Air Serbia, CEO, Jiri Marek at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit World 2025

Transcript

Jiri Marek:I would say it's a year of a bit of the mixed performance. So I would say the first half of the year was extremely good, even for us. Like we were growing around 8%. And from the second half of the year, it's kind of like starting to be more flattened. It's like more like 1%, 1.5%. So there are like kind of mixed feeling what to expect for 2026. We were planning to grow around 6%, and we are currently around 3.5%. So we will end the year around between 3.5% and 4%, but we were aiming rather for 6%. We don't have a very clear, let's say, direction where it's coming from. It's like multiple segments. The biggest surprise for us this year was actually double-digit drop on the charter. We also operate the charter during the summer. So that one was double-digit, and it was kind of surprising. We don't see that on the scheduled leisure routes, but particularly on that segment, we've been a bit surprised. We would rather look conservative, so I would say like cautiously optimistic still. So actually yesterday we took delivery of another Embraer E1 from ex-Azul. It arrived from Costa Rica via New York, Canada, Iceland to Belgrade, pretty long flight. So we are taking another one as a delivery this winter, plus 3 Airbus A320ceos. this winter. So we will be for the next year entering with 31 aircraft in our fleet plus 8 aircraft on a wet lease. We have around 16 co-chairs now. We are cooperating with, you know, we are not part of any alliance, so we are not restricted to cooperate with anybody we want. So we have good partners for all 3 major alliances. What we see lately, we are elevating the partnership actually to attract other airlines also to come to Belgrade because we have already more than 100 destinations. So the latest arrival, we are having the cooperation with Royal Jordanian, which will open the flight to Belgrade and use Belgrade as a gateway further to Europe. Also SCAD from Kazakhstan. So these are like, we already grow, let's say we have a, I would say in a way economy of scale, like critical mass of the network that we became also attractive as kind of niche secondary hub for some of the airlines which are now trying to come to Europe as well. We took the massive growth, let's say, right after COVID with this pent-up demand. We opened more than 50 destinations in 2 years. So we are already 70% above pre-COVID level. So I think that was a massive one. Now we are more like organic growth. So we announced Toronto, which we open next year as a 5th long-haul destination. And we will have a couple of, let's say, short-haul destinations, which we will announce next week. actually. And also we are starting to go for the winter destination, which we will announce also next week to challenge a bit the seasonality. We are positioning ourselves as a regional airline, especially in our, let's say, what we call wider Balkan region. We are already covering 17 destinations in the former Yugoslavia, and we will continue to build on that because basically via Belgrade, we would like to offer the seamless connectivity, not only in Europe, but also, let's say, we fly also China, we fly also America. And we will continue to build that, but I would say we will never position ourselves as a global airline. We know who we are and we want to stay that way. In general, I already many years coming to CAPA events and I like it because it's a good kind of platform for the networking, not only amongst the same peers about the airlines, but also about the suppliers and others. And especially this one in December is kind of year closing. You are already almost through your budget, so you have actually time to come and also reflect on the year behind us.

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