Latvia’s airBaltic to open Tampere, Finland base in 2Q22

airBaltic (BT, Riga) will open a base at Tampere in southern Finland on May 1, 2022, its first outside its home market in the Baltics.

The Latvian carrier will deploy a single A220-300 out of Tampere for use in launching new routes to Oslo Gardermoen, Copenhagen Kastrup, Frankfurt Int’l, Munich (3x weekly each), Malaga, and Rhodes (2x weekly each). It will also retain its 2x weekly services to Tampere from Riga, operated with an A220 based out of Latvia.

“We have been performing direct flights from Tampere to Riga for almost five years now. Our decision to open a new base in Tampere shows our strong commitment to this city and will offer more convenient and affordable travel options for many Finnish passengers,” Chief Executive Martin Gauss said.

The airline will be the first to base aircraft out of Tampere. The ch-aviation schedules module shows that currently, the only other operator serving the Finnish city is Ryanair (FR, Dublin Int’l) with 2x weekly services to London Stansted. Finnair (AY, Helsinki Vantaa) and SAS Scandinavian Airlines (SK, Copenhagen Kastrup) are planning to resume flights from Helsinki Vantaa and Stockholm Arlanda to Tampere next summer.

airBaltic, which operates thirty-two A220-300s and has a further 18 on order from Airbus, has bases in Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn Lennart Meri. The airline has previously indicated that it might explore bases outside of its home region given the limited growth potential a population of less than six million inhabitants has. In 2019, Gauss identified Scandinavia as a particularly interesting option.

“Expansion outside of the three Baltic states will initially take place in the north of Europe, in the Nordics, where we are already known. We will see which markets we can serve, and we will start slowly,” he told ch-aviation in a recent interview.