OREANDA-NEWS. Starting from spring 2012, Estonian Air will open three new routes to Finland: on 26 March to Joensuu with four flights a week, on 27 March to Kokkola/Pietarsaari with six flights a week and on 3 April to Kajaani with four flights a week. In addition, on 8 April 2012, Estonian Air will open a new route to Tbilisi, Georgia with 4 weekly flights, reported the press-centre of Estonian Air.

The logic behind the selection of new destinations is to develop Tallinn into a hub. This will bring more passengers to Estonia who use Estonian Air network and Tallinn Airport as a transfer point in their journey onwards.

“Estonian Air is aiming to attract different types of travellers, paying more attention to increase the share of transfer passengers. As Estonian market is limited, we need to expand our market size, so the flights from Estonia are financially sustainable,” said Tero Taskila, the CEO of Estonian Air.

“According to Finavia, Finnish regional airports in Estonian Air’s network have been able to generate annually 353 563 passengers last year. However, in 2005 there were more than half a million passenger. Within last 5 years the overall passenger number in all Finnish airports have grown by more than1,3 million passengers,” added Taskila.

“Estonian Air is now the only international and full service carrier operating from those places providing a wide connectivity to Europe, Scandinavia and CIS. Connection passengers from smaller cities and the surrounding areas such as Tartu, Jyvaskyla, Trondheim, Kokkola/Pietarsaari, Kajaani and Joensuu enable Estonian Air to provide a good flight schedule and prices to, for example, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Moscow and other big cities in Europe,” explained Taskila.