Up to 80 airlines, including Niki, fly in and out of Vienna International Airport with most of the traffic, 80 per cent, being within the Schengen area.
VIE, which is located just 16 minutes away from Vienna city centre, owns Malta International Airport.
Privatised in 1992, the second airport to go through a privatisation process in Europe, VIE handled 19.7 million passengers last year, registering a growth of 5.2 per cent. This year the figure is expected to drop to about 18 million.
In the first quarter of this year, passengers fell by 14.8 per cent to 3.7 million, transfer passengers were down 15.1 per cent to 1.1 million, flight movement dropped 10.4 per cent to 56,820 and MTOW also declined by 19.2 per cent to 1.6 million.
The Vienna Airport Group employs about 4,500 workers.
Gauged by the number of departing passengers, the most popular destination from VIE is by far western Europe, with 6.5 million (an increase of 6.5 per cent), followed by eastern Europe - 1.8 million (+9.6 per cent), the Far East - 449,738 (-10.6 per cent), the Middle east - 411,256 (+6.3 per cent), North America - 283,099 (+8.6 per cent), Africa - 118,094 (-7.3 per cent) and, finally, Latina America - 3,622 (+520.2 per cent).
The company is forecasting that passengers should rise to 26.5 million by 2015 and up again to 33.5 million five years later.
VIE has launched a transfer incentive scheme - amounting to €8.21 for each departing transfer passenger - aimed at raising and promoting transfer traffic, to support the company's hub function, to induce airlines to develop connection and hub concepts via Vienna airport and to get airliners to further expand their existing transfer connections.
It also operates a growth incentive scheme that is meant to attract new airlines and encourage additional capacity and also to strengthen the hub function of VIE and enhance its network. This scheme is open to long-haul and eastern European destinations.
The incentive scheme offers an 80 per cent landing fee discount in the case of new destinations in the first year of operations, 60 per cent in the second and 40 per cent in the third year. Landing fees will be discounted by 60 per cent in the first year of operations and by 40 per cent in the second, in the case of additional flights.
A high frequency incentive scheme cuts landing fees by 20 per cent in the case of seven weekly flights to eastern European destinations, 30 per cent if 14 flights weekly are operated, and 40 per cent if the number of weekly flights are 21. In the case of long haul destinations the discounts are as follows: 20 per cent for three weekly flights; 30 per cent - five flights; 40 per cent - seven flights; 45 per cent - 10 flights and 50 per cent - 14 weekly flights.
As of July 1, VIE will also be offering initiatives aimed at sharing market risks with airlines. The transfer incentive will rise by €2, there will be a shift from airline-related tariffs to passenger-related tariffs and there will also be a reduction of the security charge for transfer passengers.
VIE chief executive officer Herbert Kaufmann is confident about the future prospects of the company that although he does acknowledge the prevailing economic situation is not very encouraging. He notes that VIE is flexible enough to be able to cope even if the crisis takes longer than what is being forecast.
The author was in Vienna as guest of Malta International Airport.