[IMG=20839-6611]It is still two months until the end of the season but consolidators of charter flights to Cyprus have already started to tighten their belts. The first to set this trend was Luzhniky-Tour Voyage – starting from September they will operate three charters per week by S7 Airlines instead of four. Termination of the Sunday Boeing-737 flight not only caused a shortage of tickets to Cyprus from Luzhniky-Tour Voyage but also prompted other consolidators to consider moving to ensure full capacity on their flights.
You may recall that a month ago Luzhniky-Tour Voyage saved the state of the market by changing its Sunday Airbus-310 for the smaller Boeing-737. At the end of July and the beginning of August – the peak season for Cyprus, there was a sudden drop in demand caused by an influx of refugees from Lebanon into Cyprus.
According to Alexander Tugolukov, Director of Biblio-Globus, in August consolidators of flights to Cyprus sold tickets at smaller margins than last year. ‘It could be worse’, he added ‘at the moment the tourist flow is increasing gradually and is approaching the level of last year’. It indeed seems to be so, as in general consolidators are not reducing the number of flights to Cyprus that they offer. Thus Biblio-Globus still operates two Boeing flights seven days a week in co-operation with VIM-avia and KD-avia. According to information from Biblio-Globus, flights are currently running at full capacity. One more consolidator - Super Nova – is also not rushing into terminating its twice weekly Boeing-757 flight. However, the company is offering unusually high commission to its agents. The situation concerning one other consolidator – Vesma, who operate twice weekly Boeing-737 flights with KD-avia remains unclear. The company state that in July they changed KD-avia for VIM-avia; experts say that Vesma terminated its own flights during a difficult July for the company and started consolidating a flight in co-operation with Super Nova.
