The successful 2016 tourist season helped bring in 8.1 million air passengers, who mostly arrived to Croatia during the summer months.
The seven Croatian airports last year - for the first time in history - serviced more than 8 million passengers. This is almost 900,000 more passengers than in 2015, reports Vecernji List on January 24, 2017.
Most of these 8.1 million air passengers arrived ro Croatia during the summer months, which is a further testament to the true success of the 2016 tourist season.
In addition, most of the airports themselves broke their own records in 2016.
Split Airport - for the first time in its history - exceeded the figure of 2 million passengers in a single year, and in July alone the airport serviced a whopping 544,262 passengers! This is a big difference from Janaury 2016 when there were less than 26,000 passengers through the Split airport.
Dubrovnik airport, just shy of reaching 2 million, received an impressive 1,991,000 passenger arrivals to the airport in 2016, and Zadar airport for the first time ever reached half a million passengers. Pula Airport also broke their record in 2016 by reaching 400,000 passengers for the first time ever.
Zagreb's Pleso Airport (or Franjo Tudjman airport), the largest airport in Croatia, serviced more than 2.7 million passengers in 2016 which is a 7% increase from 2015. The airport's busiest month last year was August when there were 284,419 passenger arrivals, and the slowest month was February which brought in only 141,834 passengers. Soon to open is the new airport terminal which will incorporate equipment that can receive up to 3.5 million passengers a year.
This year's domestic airports could very easily break new records as many airlines have already announced the introduction of new routes to Croatia. Thus, the second biggest European low-budget airline EasyJet has announced seven new routes for Croatian airports this season, the mighty Emirates of the United Arab Emirates will begin daily flights from Dubai - Zagreb in June, and the widebody Boeing 777 with a capacity of 364 seats will connect Basel with Osijek on the Hungarian Wizz Air.
What a season 2016 was.
