After a very successful 2022, Air Astana is preparing with increased capacity for the spring-summer travel season of 2023. Air Astana said today that it has shifted to its spring-summer schedule for 2023 as the Northern Hemisphere patiently awaits the anticipated arrival of warmer months. From March 26 to October 29 of 2023, the revised operation schedule will be in force.
Air Astana intends to gradually increase the number of international flights it operates from its base in Kazakhstan through more frequent flights, the addition of new services, and the restart of summer seasonal flights. In comparison to its low-cost subsidiary, FlyArystan, which flew eight international and 26 local routes at the end of 2022, Air Astana operated a network of 27 international and 15 domestic flights.
a new fleet and expanding network
A youthful fleet of 43 aircraft, including 35 Airbus A320/A321 family aircraft, three Boeing 767-300ERs, and five Embraer E190 E2 aircraft, is operated by the Air Astana Group. Three Boeing 787 Dreamliners will be delivered starting in 2025, bringing the fleet’s average age to six years.
This year, six further aircraft are anticipated to be added to the fleet. Air Astana has two major hubs in Kazakhstan: Almaty International Airport (ALA), which serves as its home base, and Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport, which serves as the country’s capital (NQZ). Services from both of those airports are affected by the schedule adjustments that were announced today, along with the following.
in Almaty
Ten additional flights per week will be made to Antalya (Turkey).
There will be seven more flights each week to Tbilisi (Georgia).
fourteen weekly flights to Tashkent (Uzbekistan)
Up to five flights per week will now be available to London
There are nine weekly flights to Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan).
Istanbul will have eleven weekly flights, with daily flights to Beijing and weekly flights to Chengdu in China.
The number of weekly flights to Baku (Azerbaijan) and Dushanbe (Tajikistan) will rise to four.
in Astana
raised to seven days per week in Antalya
The weekly increase in Tbilisi was three.
Five flights per week to Tashkent
Beijing two or more times weekly
Istanbul receives up to seven weekly flights.
Moreover, there will now be three additional flights per week between Istanbul and Kazakhstan’s Atyrau International Airport (GUW), which is located near the Caspian Sea.
Relaunches for the spring and summer seasons
Certain seasonal services will be relaunched and others will be continued as part of the spring-summer program. Resuming from Almaty will be seasonal flights to Bodrum (Turkey), Heraklion (Greece), Podgorica (Montenegro), and Batumi (Georgia). The number of flights between Astana and Podgorica will also increase to three each week.
Last but not least, Air Astana said that it would keep running direct daily flights from Almaty to Thailand, with three weekly flights to Bangkok and four weekly flights to Phuket International Airport (HKT).
following a successful 2022
In the previous fiscal year, the Air Astana Group carried 7.35 million passengers for revenues of $1.03 billion, resulting in a profit after tax of $78.4 million. These figures exceeded those of 2021 by 115%, 36%, and 11%, respectively, making them the highest in the airline’s 20 years of operation.
The airline was impacted by political upheaval in Kazakhstan as well as route closures to, from, and over Russia as a result of the conflict in Ukraine. The revenue lost from those events, according to President and CEO Peter Foster, “was more than made up for by additional capacity deployment to Europe, Asia, India, and the Caucasus.” He had high hopes for FlyArystan as well.
“FlyArystan has increased by 366% from its first year, which was 2019. Given that this region currently boasts the fastest-growing low-cost air travel industry in the world, it has a bright future.”
Foster predicted that 2023 would see an increase in the number of passengers, but he also cautioned that there would still be challenges, including ongoing resource and supply chain constraints for airports and service providers, inflation, and “technical reliability issues with the Pratt & Whitney 1100 engines.”
