Serbia’s second largest airport, Constantine the Great Airport in Nis, broke its record for passenger numbers on November 28, announcing the following day that 300,000 passengers had travelled through the airport since the beginning of the year.

Constantine the Great Airport is a very rare success story about a small airport in a region where most struggle to survive. 

This is mainly thanks to its geographical position - Nis is the closest airport to citizens across the eastern and southern parts of the country - but it was famous until 2015 as an airport without travellers. Instead, numerous Serbs opted to travel via Skopje in neighbouring Macedonia. 

However, regular air traffic resumed after a 19-month break in June 2015 when Hungarian low-cost carrier Wizz Air started operating flights from Nis to Basel. Today, Nis’s airport gathers travellers from Skopje, Pristina and other towns in neighbouring countries on their way to Western Europe.

Other low cost airlines have also arrived; the airport said that the 300,000th passenger was flying from Nis to Stockholm by Ryanair.

“Thanks to the number of European destinations (11 in total) to which there are flights from Nis, as well as thanks to the number of flights, which totals 22 per week, we expect to serve over 320,000 passengers by end-2017,” the company said in a press release posted on its website.

Constantine the Great Airport recorded 124,917 passengers in 2016, 300% up against 2015.