The Vilnius City Council has approved a plan to have more direct connections from the city’s expanded airport. The scheme includes marketing to promote flying on a few dozen routes deemed important for businesses and inbound tourism.
The municipality says it will finance marketing measures to promote flights important for business. Moreover, the scheme, to be put into effect next year, seeks to attract more foreign travellers and investors and stimulate demand for the routes that are deemed important.
According to Vilnius municipality, the campaign will precede the opening of a new terminal at Vilnius Airport. In 2019, the airport serviced 5 million passengers, but the new addition will increase its capacity to 8 million a year.
“What’s important is not only having a destination on our list, but also how often and when the flights are operated. We want to increase the number of flights to existing destinations,” Adomas Bužinskas, chief of administration at Vilnius Municipality, said during the council meeting on Wednesday, adding that Lithuania has the ambition of having direct flies from Vilnius to New York.
“Of the 24 priority destinations, we have achieved a lot working on destinations from Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Madrid and Dublin,” Bužinskas said.
In order to fund the scheme, the council has decided to raise the city tax – paid by tourists staying at hotels – from one to two euros per night.
The city tax in Vilnius will go up from January 1.
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