Co-owner of Vnukovo expects a 40% increase in prices for flights abroad in 2023

The cost of air tickets within Russia will increase by 15-20%, for international flights – up to 40%, Vitaly Vantsev, co-owner of Vnukovo and Azimuth airlines, predicts. He explained this by the costs of airlines for the maintenance of aircraft.

“I think that there will be an increase of about 15-20% on domestic flights, and up to 40% on international flights. But there is no need to treat this in such a way that the airlines are fucking taking advantage of the situation. From the outside, it may look like this, but everything is actually different, ”said Mr. Vantsev RBC.

The businessman said that the warehouses of spare parts of airlines allow “more or less normal existence” for about a year. They will then need to be replenished. But spare parts have risen in price due to sanctions, which will affect the cost of the final product.

At the same time, Mr. Vantsev opposed the allocation of additional subsidies for the maintenance of domestic transportation. In his opinion, this is “an exceptional mechanism that should be activated at the moment when something extreme happens.” Such an exclusive subsidy “does not have to work all the time, unlike, for example, subsidies for regional transportation.”

In May, the cost of a flight in an economy class cabin in Russia grew by 28% year on year, up to 6972.36 rubles. per 1 thousand km of track. This is the highest since 2000. For the period from January to May, the price of a flight increased by 32%. Ministry of Transport declaredthat the rise in price does not exceed the inflation index predicted by the Central Bank for 2023. The FAS said that seasonality, demand and inflation affect ticket prices. In April, Deputy Transport Minister Igor Chalik predictedthat flights within Russia by the summer may rise in price by a third against the background of the fact that the industry has not received subsidies comparable to the level of last year, when airlines got about 100 billion rubles.

How the increase in leasing rates will affect the cost of air tickets – in the column of Aigul Abdullina “Airplanes inflate their worth”.

Leonid Uvarchev