Croatia Airlines has announced it will expand operations at its Zagreb Airport (ZAG) hub with the commencement of five new routes from the gateway for the northern summer of 2025. Some of the new routes will see the carrier return to cities that it previously served before the COVID-19 pandemic but dropped as passenger numbers dwindled as the global health crisis took hold.
The new destinations will include direct, nonstop flights from Zagreb to Milan Malpensa (MXP), Prague (PRG), Bucharest (OTP), Madrid (MAD), and Hamburg (HAM). Flights to Milan and Prague will start on June 2, 2025, with both routes operating three times a week. Meanwhile, the new services to Hamburg, Bucharest, and Madrid will begin in July 2025.
Servis to Hamburg and Bucharest will launch on July 1, 2025, while flights to Madrid will follow on July 3, 2025. These three routes will also operate three times weekly. All flights will be operated with Croatia Airlines’ Airbus A220-300 aircraft which accommodate 149 passengers in a single class layout.
Croatia Airlines last served Milan, Prague, and Bucharest from Zagreb in 2019, and had plans to resume them in 2020. However, these plans were shelved due to the pandemic. The airline last flew to Hamburg in 2012, although German carrier Eurowings has served the route more recently. Zagreb was linked to Hamburg in 2019 by Eurowings although currently remains unserved.
The airline will be going head-to-head with another carrier on just one of the new routes, with Iberia already an incumbent on the Madrid to Zagreb route. On services to Milan, Ryanair indirectly competes, operating five times per week between Zagreb and Bergamo Airport (BGO) during the peak summer travel season. While Croatia Airlines had also hoped to begin flights in 2025 between Zagreb and Lisbon )LIS), it is understood that the carrier was unable to secure appropriate slots at the Portuguese airport.
This expansion of the carrier’s network to key European destinations such as those above aligns with Croatia Airlines’ strategy to grow operations with the introduction of its new fleet of Airbus A220 aircraft of which the carrier currently has two with a further 11 on order, in addition to two A220-100s also on order. The airline is scheduled to receive five more A220-300s and one of the A220-100s in 2025. Alongside its Airbus A220 fleet, the carrier also operates two A319s, two A320s, and five De Havilland Canada DHC-8-Q400s turboprops.
