Turkey and Morocco see soaring number of UK flights this month

Statistics from aviation analytics firm Cirium show the number of scheduled, charter and budget carrier departures from the UK to Morocco increased 74.5% in July 2024 compared with the same month in 2019. Flights are also up 52% year on year.

The number of services to Turkey this month is up 71% on 2019 and 16% on last July. Cirium also shows Greece as another big winner, with capacity up 37% on July 2019. Cyprus and Croatia also record double-figure increases.

The losers are Spain, down slightly at -0.9%, Italy (-7.3%) and the UAE, down 8.3%. However, Spain is still far ahead of other destinations, with more than 14,000 flights.

Morocco’s increase, from 369 flights in July 2019 to 644 this year follows a concerted effort by its government, which last year pledged £446 million to attract more tourists and airlines.

The country hopes to reach 17.5 million tourist visits by 2026, compared to 14.5 million last year and 13 million in 2019.

Turkey has seen huge capacity increases from Jet2 and Tui boosted by the weak Turkish lira. This July it will see 4,171 departures, compared to 2,440 in 2019.

UK visits to Turkey reached 3.8 million last year, a 12.8% increase on 2022 and are set to rise sharply again this year.

The industry’s peak summer period begins on Friday (19 July), with the majority of UK schools breaking up. Cirium said easyJet would have the largest number of UK departures this weekend, followed by Ryanair, British Airways, Jet2.com and Tui.

Friday will see 3,214 departures, the highest since October 2019. Cirium said compared to the same weekend in 2023, scheduled flights were up 4% year-on-year, while departures across the weekend are set to reach 93% of 2019 levels.