Stockholm Arlanda Airport will soon see more Chinese travellers flying on its route to Beijing than Swedish.
The airport currently has a daily service to the capital operated by Air China, which has traditionally been used by Swedish businessmen and tourists.
However, Swedavia Airports director aviation business Elizabeth Axtelius said a number of factors have driven an increase in Chinese travellers and she expects them to soon become the main market.
She said: “Currently it is a 50/50 mix between Swedish and Chinese traveller but if you look a few years back in time it was mainly Swedish businessmen travelling to China.
“A few years ago we had a lot of Swedish tourists going to China but we don’t see an increase there. Now we have more Chinese businessmen coming into Sweden and investing in it while the Chinese tourists seem to have discovered Sweden.”
Axtelius said the increase in Chinese tourists is becomingly increasingly pronounced as many of them grow bored of traditional European destinations like London and Paris and are instead finding new places to go.
“It’s been a trend over the last couple of years so definitely by the next summer we will see the majority of passengers will be Chinese,” she added.
Axtelius added regardless of the ethnicity of the travellers, Arlanda Airport, which had 23.1 million passengers last year, is currently underserved on its Chinese routes with only one other five-times-a-week service to Hong Kong.
She said: “The market is still underserved and it is getting more and more popular with tourists.
“We’ve had a 40% increase in capacity over the years but the demand has grown by 60% from 2013 to 2015.”
Axtelius added while the airport is looking for additional capacity on its current China routes, it is also looking for new ones into the country with Shanghai being top of the list.
She believes much of the growth could be driven by low cost carrier Norwegian once it receives permission to fly over Russia.
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