New Route of the Day (9 April 2022): Transavia between Nantes and Figari
Transavia on Saturday 9 April began a new weekly service between Nantes and Figari, on the French island of Corsica. Frequency will increase to 2-weekly between May and September. The 1,060-kilometre route is already served by Volotea (daily, increasing to 10-weekly in July and August) and easyJet (2-weekly, increasing to 4-weekly in July and August).
Last summer Transavia launched multiple new routes from mainland French airports to Corsica. These were:
- Brest to: Ajaccio (2-weekly), Bastia (2-weekly), Calvi (weekly) and Figari (weekly)
- Montpellier to: Ajaccio (2-weekly), Bastia (weekly), Calvi (weekly) and Figari (weekly)
- Nantes to: Ajaccio (3-weekly), Bastia (2-weekly) and Calvi (2-weekly)
That made a total of 18 weekly flights across 11 routes. As can be seen, the ‘missing’ route was between Nantes and Figari, which has now launched. However, four of last year’s routes have been dropped, those connecting Brest and Montpellier with Calvi and Figari. As a result, Transavia is only offering 13 weekly flights to Corsica from French airports in August 2022. For comparison, Air Corsica is offering 248 weekly flights (down from 242 last August), Air France 136 (down from 142), Volotea 133 (down from 157) and easyJet 93 (down from 100).
Corsican airports performed well in 2021
Compared with most airports in Europe, Corsica’s four airports performed reasonably well last summer compared with 2019 (Source: UAF):
- Ajaccio: handled 1.41m pax in 2021, down 13% versus 2019
- Bastia: handled 1.20m pax in 2021, down 23% versus 2019
- Figari: handled 790k pax in 2021, up 6% versus 2019
- Calvi: handled 298k pax in 2021, down 12% versus 2019
- All four combined: handled 3.70m pax in 2021, down 13% versus 2019
Ajaccio and Bastia ranked as the 11th and 12th busiest airports in metropolitan France in 2022. All of the top 10 airports reported traffic that was down between 48% (Paris BVA) and 66% (Paris CDG), highlighting just how well Corsican airports performed as French holidaymakers chose to take ‘domestic’ holidays rather than international holidays as a result of the more restrictive travel rules still in place last summer.
