Stavanger is Norway’s fourth-busiest airport; it has just welcomed LOT Polish Airlines

Stavanger is the energy capital of Norway. With nearly four million passengers in 2024, it was the country’s fourth-busiest airport, behind Oslo OSL, Bergen and Trondheim.

airBaltic, Flyr and PLAY pulled out in 2022. Despite this, traffic rose marginally year-over-year to the highest level since 2020. But the airport’s recovery continues. Compared to before the pandemic in 2019, throughput remained down by 8%.

LOT Polish now serves Stavanger, but Loganair pulls out in December

On 24 November, LOT Polish inaugurated service from its Warsaw WAW hub to Stavanger. Marking its debut in Stavanger, it runs 4-weekly. The carrier has doubled its routes to Norway. According to Cirium’s schedule information, the airport pair was served by Norwegian between 2007 and 2016 and by Wizz Air in 2012 and 2015.

Despite serving Stavanger since 2019, Loganair’s last flight from Aberdeen will be on December 29. However, the market from Norway’s energy capital to the UK’s oil and gas capital will remain served by SAS and Widerøe.

SAS is the top airline

Cirium indicates that Stavanger has 1.1 million one-way seats in W25, which is 2% lower than in W24. SAS is, of course, the leading operator. It has 420,000 one-way seats, down by 6% year-over-year. The reduction is entirely from the domestic market (-8%) and not international (+4%). It has five routes: Aberdeen, Bergen, Copenhagen, Oslo and Trondheim.

SAS has cut multiple routes over the years. Served until 2014, London LHR had by far the most capacity. The most unusual route was Houston IAH, which SAS served in 2014/2015 using a leased PrivatAir 737 in an all-business class configuration.

The only ULCC is Wizz Air, which has flown to Stavanger since 2011. It has 62,000 one-way seats in W25, which have risen by a third year-over-year from increasing frequencies on its two routes to Gdansk and Krakow. Wizz Air has half the capacity of Stavanger’s three foreign network carriers, KLM, LOT Polish and Lufthansa.

Domestic Norway has 66% of seats, but only four markets

Cirium shows that Stavanger has winter flights to 19 airports, of which only four are domestic. However, because domestic flights often have higher frequencies, they account for two-thirds of the airport’s capacity.

With 421,000 one-way seats, or 40% of the total, the capital link to Oslo OSL is the leading market. There are 117-weekly one-way flights in early December, which are operated by Norwegian (66) and SAS (51).

Examining Stavanger’s network in the past decade shows that 20 airports with 10,000 or more non-stop one-way seats are no longer served. In order of capacity, they are London LHR, Kaunas, Katowice, Stockholm ARN, Szczecin, Kristiansand, Berlin SXF (since closed), Vilnius, Riga, Keflavik, Budapest, Houston IAH, Floro, Prague, London LTN, Edinburgh, Salzburg, Murcia, Kristiansund and Billund.