Air Travel Industry in Kazakhstan Is Ready to Ride High

Over nine months of this year, the number of people who traveled by air increased by 81% up to 6.9 million, according to the country’s Ministry of Industry and Infrastructural Development.

The number of those passengers who received airport services has also increased by 70% to 12.6 million people (7.4 million over the same period of 2020 and 12.3 million in 2019).

All flight destinations inside the country have been restored at the moment (57 routes with 744 flights per week). Also, the country’s airlines have restored flights to 23 international destinations (63 routes with 247 flights per week) such as Turkey, the UAE, Korea, Germany, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Egypt, Russian, Georgia, Tajikistan, Poland, the Netherlands, Montenegro, Armenia, the U.K. Hungary, the Maldives, Qatar, Sri Lanka and Thailand. 

There are 106 domestic and 35 international flights per day on average.

Last year Kazakhstani airlines carried just five million passengers or 27% less than it did in 2019. Over the first half of this year the air travel industry reported about 3.9 million passengers, the vast majority of whom (3.5 million) traveled inside the country.

The leading airlines such as Air Astana, Scat, Qazaq Air and FlyArystan predict that the final number of passengers this year might reach a nine million threshold. Air Astana would account for 3.5 million of them; Scat – 1.5 million, Qazaq Air – 576,000. The only low-cost airline FlyArystan expects that the number of its passengers may be about 3.5 million in total.