Tallinn Airport Sets Another Record
Text Timo Raussi Photo Visit Estonia / Sven Začek
Tallinn Airport has set a new all-time monthly passenger record. Nearly 390,000 passengers passed through the airport in August, 16% more than a year earlier. Between January and August, the total number of passengers reached 2.54 million, an increase of 11% compared with the same period last year. Growth has been driven particularly by the low-cost airline Wizz Air, which has significantly expanded its operations in Estonia over the past year. In August, the airline already accounted for 18% of all passengers.
The largest airline operating from Tallinn in August was still airBaltic, with a 29% market share, although the company is currently struggling with a serious financial crisis. Last week, airBaltic announced that it would reduce its direct connections from Tallinn by around half next summer. The news was disappointing for the airport’s CEO Riivo Tuvike. On the other hand, Tuvike told Estonian Public Broadcasting ERR that the situation had been monitored for long enough that even if the darkest possible scenario came true and the Latvian taxpayer-supported airline did not survive the winter, it would not cut Tallinn’s air connections to the rest of the world.
This is also confirmed by Eero Pärgmäe, a member of the airport’s management board. “The winter-season route network, which comes into effect at the end of October, will be slightly smaller than during the summer, but Tallinn will still offer 39 direct destinations as well as good onward connections through Europe’s most important hub airports.”
A total of 19 airlines flew from Tallinn in August. During the month, there were 4,047 take-offs and landings, an average of around 130 flight operations per day. As many as 94% of August’s passengers used scheduled flights, while only six% travelled on charter holiday flights. The most popular holiday destinations from Tallinn were Antalya and holiday resorts in Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria. Warsaw was the busiest scheduled destination, followed by Helsinki, Riga, Frankfurt and Stockholm.
During the upcoming winter season, Wizz Air will operate direct flights from Tallinn to eight destinations: Budapest, Gdańsk, Kraków, London Luton, Rome, Warsaw, Venice and Vilnius. The airline’s rapid growth has particularly increased connections with Central and Eastern Europe, and, naturally, travel in the opposite direction from Europe to Tallinn. Christmas tourism is no longer a phenomenon limited to Finnish Lapland, either.
This coming winter, around 10,000 visitors from the United Kingdom are expected to travel to Estonia. The airline Jet2.com is almost doubling the capacity of its Christmas flights compared with last year, meaning that between 19 November 2026 and 5 January 2027, visitors arriving from Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, London and Manchester may be heard chatting at Tallinn’s Christmas Market. “Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!”
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