Aeroflot Rethinks Moscow – St Petersburg Capacity

Aeroflot Russian Airlines is to introduce a 13th daily rotation between Moscow and St Petersburg, the busiest domestic route within the Russian Federation. The additional flight has been confirmed in the carrier’s GDS inventory despite it previously shelving plans to originally increase capacity from 12 to 17 daily flights for the coming schedule.

The additional mid-morning departure from Moscow Sheremetyevo and early afternoon return from St Petersburg will be operated by an Airbus A320 from June 1, 2012. The majority of flights on the route are operated using Airbus A320 Family equipment although two afternoon / evening rotations are scheduled to be flown using Sukhoi SSJ-100 Superjets.

An estimated 1.82 million O&D passengers travelled between Moscow and St Petersburg last year, down 10.3 per cent on the previous 12 month period but up 36 per cent in the past five years. This month there are around 245 weekly flights between the two cities offering over 33,000 seats in each direction. Alongside Aeroflot’s flights from Sheremetyevo; Globus, Rossiya Airlines, S7 Airlines, Transaero Airlines, and Ural Airlines have links from Domodedovo and Gazpromavia, Kuban Airlines, Rossiya Airlines and UTair from Vnukovo.

Aeroflot is the dominant carrier between the two cities with 34.7 per cent of the available capacity. In the past year it had an estimated 29.5 per cent share of the traffic between Moscow and St Petersburg, down from 30.0 per cent last year, but up from just 9.5 per cent five years ago.