airBaltic new Finnish base

airBaltic is opening a new base in…Tampere, Finland!

Quite a lot of activity in the Nordic aviation scene this year. Let’s recap:

• Finnair opened a new long haul base at Stockholm Arlanda airport

• Wizz Air set up bases in Norway, only to withdraw (as a base country, not all flights) a few months later

• Flyr, a new Norwegian (as in nationality) airline started by former Norwegian (as in airline) employees

• Norwegian came back from the brink and from the read after getting rid of all long haul operations and reducing its size significantly

Also, interesting choice by airBaltic in its quest to expand beyond its, rather small, home market. Tampere is Finland’s third largest city, but with a population of some 300k, it is hardly a metropolis.

In any case, after successfully setting up bases in neighbouring Estonia and Lithuania (and painting the “local” aircraft in the national colours to highlight this Balticness), the Latvian airline’s CEO, Martin Gauss, had already hinted in the past that the next move may be expanding outside of the Baltics. airBaltic will launch 6 new routes out of the Finnish city, in addition to the already existing one to its main Riga hub.

A constant reminder for all national airlines that they can not take their domestic feeder markets for granted!