Boom times at Brussels Airport
New airlines, new destinations and pent-up demand for travel will see Brussels Airport (BRU) return to its pre-pandemic form in 2022.
From this summer, BRU will be connected to 185 destinations, via 60 passenger airlines. That’s just shy of the 200 destinations it served before Covid.
Helping drive the revival is Air Belgium, which introduced Curaçao and Mauritius as new destinations over winter. The carrier will also add Johannesburg and Cape Town in September, and Bonaire later in the year.
TUI fly is also whisking passengers off to the sun. After adding Havana to BRU’s destination list, the carrier is set to introduce weekly flights to Aruba and reintroduce its service to Miami. It will also add Zadar to its European network. New flights to Dakar, Zanzibar, and Mombasa will follow.
Brussels Airlines will also boost BRU’s African network, with Ouagadougou and Conakry coming later this year.
As well as existing partners, the airport is working with new airlines this summer. From June, the Dutch carrier Transavia will station a Boeing 737-800 at BRU, operating16 flights a week to Alicante, Ibiza, Faro, and Heraklion. Next winter it will commence services to Tenerife, Innsbruck, and Salzburg.
In May, Flyr, the low-cost Norwegian carrier, will offer four flights a week to Oslo. The Icelandic airline PLAY is also set to launch four weekly flights to Reykjavik, with connections to the US. Another newbie, TUS Airways from Cyprus, will fly to Larnaca on Monday and Friday from June.
In addition to these new carriers, BRU has welcomed back old air partners. The first was Delta Air Lines, which started a daily flight to New York/JFK in March. Air Transat is also set to launch three A321neoXLR flights per week to Montreal.
Existing carriers are expanding their operations at BRU this summer. Corendon Airlines has already launched its first flights to Las Palmas and Tenerife in Spain, and Nador and Al Hoceima in Morocco. Eurowings is starting a weekly flight to Pristina, while SKY Express and Aegean Airlines will add Heraklion and Kalamata to their respective networks.
Meanwhile, Royal Air Maroc will start a new twice-weekly flight to Marrakesh, and Turkish Airlines will fly thrice weekly to Ankara. Finally, Swiss will fly daily to Geneva.
Things are looking up.
