As of April, a total of 524,600 passengers have traveled through Ukraine’s third busiest air traffic hub, Lviv Danylo Halytskyi International Airport in western Ukraine.
Lviv is the largest city in western Ukraine, located 540 kilometers southwest of Kyiv and home to about 720,000 people.
The passenger flow increase is 51.9 percent more compared to last year’s figure for the same four-month period, in which the airport served 345,400 passengers.
April alone has seen 155,200 passengers use the airport in Lviv, which is 48.2 percent more compared to the 104,700 passengers of last April. The data was collected and reported on the airport’s official Facebook page.
The increase in passenger traffic corresponds to the upward trend of passengers flying through all Ukrainian airports, as reported by the Kyiv Post in January.
1.57 million passengers traveled through Lviv in 2018, which constituted a 47.9 percent increase compared 2017.
Only Boryspil and Zhuliany – both located in Kyiv – did better last year in terms of passenger volumes with 12.6 million and 2.8 million passengers respectively.
Passenger traffic across all Ukrainian airports has increased by 24.5 percent to 20.55 million travelers from 2017 to 2018. It has almost doubled during the past five years from 10.8 to 20.5 million people.
The Ukrainian aviation industry has continued its growth since the 2014 crisis, caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
More flights and increased passenger traffic is largely thanks to the simplification of border crossing procedures for Ukrainians, who gained a visa-free regime with the European Union in 2017.
Reforms within the aviation industry, the entry of new airlines into the marketplace and investments into airport infrastructure have also played a part in the resurgence of the Ukrainian air travel market. In 2018 alone, seven new airlines and 30 flight routes began operating.
