Airline Pobeda says loses 1 billion rubles from Turkey flights ban

MOSCOW, Aug 16 (PRIME) – The low-cost Pobeda airlines, part of the Aeroflot group, lost more than 1 billion rubles from suspension of flights to Turkey, said Andrei Kalmykov, the company’s head, on Monday.

“According to our most conservative estimates, our total revenue losses and shortfalls amount to more than 1 billion rubles. We’ve wasted a lot of time canceling flights or rescheduling them, and suffered direct losses from the need to carry out flights with no passengers onboard to evacuate Russians,” he said.

“For instance, the Tyumen-Antalya or Ekaterinburg-Antalya flights cannot be compensated by any other routes in terms of flight hours, and we had a huge number of flights departing from our domestic regions. So in the end we had to reassign our planes to less profitable destinations between April and June. And where we simply increased the frequency of flights, we lowered the margin. This is why the sudden Turkish crisis hit us greatly.”

The company will be short by the billion in profit in 2021, said Kalmykov.

Another temporary ban on the air travel between Russia and Turkey was in effect between 15 April and 22 June due to the dire COVID-19 situation in the countries.

(73.4721 – U.S. $1)

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