Domestic flights in Cape Verde with an annual increase of more than 40% in February

Domestic flights to Cape Verde, operated by a single company, handled more than 20,200 passengers in February, up 40% from last year, according to data from the Civil Aviation Agency (AAC) compiled by Lusa on Tuesday.

Domestic flights, departures and arrivals, the country’s four international airports and three aerodromes saw a global movement of 40,432 passengers in February, according to the agency that regulates the sector in Cape Verde. Since each passenger is counted when embarking and disembarking (at different airports), this movement is equivalent to 20,216 passengers on domestic flights per month.

This global movement is comparable to 14,162 passengers in February 2022 (+42.7% in 2023) and a record high since the start of the pandemic of almost 30,000 passengers in August 2022. Already in January 2020, before the impact of covid- Since the beginning of the pandemic in 19, more than 28,000 passengers have been transported by domestic flights of the archipelago.

In February 2023, 752 domestic flights were booked in Cape Verde, compared to 616 in the same month of 2022.

Domestic flights to Cape Verde handled nearly 250,000 passengers during 2022, up 70% from last year, according to previous AAC data.

Domestic flights were operated from May 17, 2021 only by the Angolan company BestFly, under a six-month emergency concession granted by the Government of Cape Verde. From October 24, BestFly began to work only with Transportes Interilhas de Cabo Verde (TICV, a company it acquired in July 2021), canceling the emergency concession regime.

The Angolan group BestFly bought out 70% of TICV’s share capital from the Spaniards of Binter more than a year ago, leaving the remaining 30% to the state of Cape Verde, and concentrated domestic flights only on TICV, which has not operated commercially since then. May 16, 2021

In 2020, domestic flights to Cape Verde, then operated only by TICV, handled about 125 thousand passengers, a decrease of 286 thousand (-230%) compared to the previous year, taking into account the restrictions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic, and in 2021 increased to 143,876 passengers.

In 2017, the number of passengers on Cape Verdean domestic flights reached a record high of almost 465,000 (total 929,595 departures and arrivals), with more than 10,200 flights flown.