It has been revealed that the Riga International Airport has had a busier time than ever before in the previous year. Released figures have demonstrated that a record number of traffic (in terms of passengers boarding in and out of the airport) has never been so high, with numbers reaching their peak level in the summer month of August. This saw over 500,000 individuals using the Riga Airport in order to get out of their respective areas for the summer vacation period. This is an incredible feat for the airport to have achieved and it is a testament to the airport’s quality customer service and efficiency that so many different passengers were able to be coordinated to their respective flights and terminals, considering the amount of passengers that the airport had to contend with.

In addition to this, over half of all of these passengers that month were transported by airBaltic, superseding the other airlines that commuted in and out of the airport, such as Ryanair or WizzAir, both of which were not nearly as popular flight providers in the airport that summer as airBaltic was. Transit rates of passengers increased by an additional 15.3 per cent, with 27.3 per cent of all passengers using Riga Airport being in transit. This fact alone indicates the site’s important and strategic location as a transitionary area used all across the Balkan area. In a similar increase, the amount of cargo haulage went up by almost 5 per cent more than the previous year 2015.

Ilona Lice, Board Chairman of the airport in question, is very pleased that the site has been able to cope with these steady increases in services and is hopeful that new targets for the new year will be implemented and exceeded, as the airport has steadily done in previous years. The outlook is therefore considerably brighter for the airport than the rest of the Baltic region is at this period in time.