Opinion: The Balkans are ready for takeoff — if we let them fly

Image: Fraport Slovenija

Every time I travel through the region, we loosely call the Balkans — through the nice and friendly arrivals or departures halls of Zagreb, Ljubljana, or Belgrade Nikola Tesla — I am struck by the same contradiction. This is a region of extraordinary aviation energy and persistent self-doubt. It moves fast and hesitates in the same breath. It builds impressive things and then undersells them to the world.

I have spent years working with aviation and travel communities across Southeast Europe, and I am convinced of something that the industry’s center of gravity — the big hubs, the legacy carriers, the capacity-heavy networks of Western Europe — has not yet fully grasped: small is not bad. In fact, in aviation, small can be decisive.

THE NUMBERS ARE ALREADY MAKING THE ARGUMENT

Let me start with the data, because the data is genuinely extraordinary. Tirana International Airport welcomed over 10 million passengers in 2024, its first time crossing that milestone, making it the fastest-growing airport in Europe since the pandemic — up 225% compared to 2019. A country of under three million people is hosting ten million travelers a year and building terminal infrastructure to accommodate fifteen million. That is not a footnote. That is a case study.

Belgrade, meanwhile, recorded its own milestone: over 8 million passengers a year, with Air Serbia launching nine new routes in 2026 alone and setting its sights on Toronto as its fifth long-haul intercontinental destination. Skopje Airport handled a record 3.4 million passengers across North Macedonia’s two airports in 2025, representing 9% year-on-year growth, with a 28.2% increase in summer 2026 scheduled seats already confirmed. Sarajevo attracted Ryanair for the first time in 2025, adding nearly 90,000 seats in a single quarter. Zagreb is seeing Ryanair expand capacity at a pace of 23.8% year-on-year.

These are not the numbers of a region waiting to be discovered. These are the numbers of a region already in motion — and the world is beginning to notice.

THE CREATIVITY OF CONSTRAINT

Yet I want to make a different argument from the one you might expect. I am not here to simply celebrate growth figures. I am here to argue that the most important competitive advantage this region possesses is precisely what its detractors point to as its weakness: limited scale and constrained resources.

When I travel to aviation conferences in London, Frankfurt, or Jeddah, I hear the same vocabulary: mega-hub, sixth-freedom traffic, fleet of four hundred aircraft, alliance connectivity. It is an impressive vocabulary. It also describes a world that most of Southeast Europe does not inhabit — and cannot and perhaps should not try to replicate.

The risk I see most acutely in this region is not a lack of ambition. It is the wrong kind of ambition: the temptation to measure success against metrics designed for a fundamentally different industry context, then conclude that because we are not Dubai, we are failing. That is a trap. Limited resources should be an invitation to creativity — not a sentence to desperation or apathy.

Consider what has actually happened when Balkan operators have been forced to be creative. Air Serbia’s story is well known — a national carrier rebuilt from the ruins of JAT, brought back to profitability through an unconventional partnership model, and now operating intercontinental routes from a market that was told it could not sustain them. ETF Airways, launched in Croatia in 2020 by three airline captains who decided to write their own vision of what an aviation company could be, grew from a blank sheet of paper and two Boeing 737s into a functioning charter and ACMI operator serving European markets from a standing start. North Macedonia, with airports that handle a fraction of the traffic of major European gateways, used government subsidy schemes creatively to attract carriers, offering nine euros per passenger for Skopje connections and twelve for Ohrid — a targeted, flexible tool that has drawn Wizz Air, Turkish Airlines, and flydubai into new routes.

No story captures this spirit more vividly than that of Ivo Boscarol, the Slovenian entrepreneur who built Pipistrel — the world’s first private aircraft manufacturer in the former Yugoslavia — from what was effectively nothing, in a small town at the foot of the Julian Alps. Boscarol began building motorized hang gliders in the 1980s when private flying was illegal under Yugoslav law. He tested his prototypes between dusk and darkness, flying low over the airfield when the director locked the hangar doors for the night. The triangular shape of the wings reminded locals of bats — pipistrello in Italian — and the name stuck. From those covert evening flights, Boscarol built a company that would go on to win the NASA Green Flight Challenge in 2011 with a four-seat fully electric aircraft flying 600 km without landing, at an average speed of 210 km/h — a benchmark that much of the global automotive and aerospace industry still has not matched. In 2020, Pipistrel’s Velis Electro became the first fully electric aircraft to receive EASA type certification. He has been named a Living Legend of Aviation by the USA Kiddie Hawk Academy, listed among Politico’s 28 most influential people in the European Union, and awarded the Order of the Italian Star. I tell this story not because it is unique to Slovenia, but because it is the most complete expression of everything I believe about this region: that the most transformative ideas are often born in the smallest places, under the most constrained conditions, by people who refuse to accept that the rules of the possible are fixed.

Albania, Puglia, and Montenegro went further still: their airports became cross-border laboratories for greenhouse gas reduction research through the Interreg SOLAR project, pioneering sustainable airport operations not because they had the largest budgets, but because they had the determination to cooperate. None of these stories came from abundance. They came from ingenuity under pressure.

SOUTHEAST EUROPE’S STRATEGIC MOMENT

There is also a larger structural argument to be made — one I find myself returning to each time we convene the Slovenian Aviation and Travel Industry Summit in Ljubljana.

Southeast Europe is no longer simply a leisure destination, though it remains one of the most beautiful and underserved tourism regions on earth. It is becoming a connector. A bridge. A geographic fact that the aviation industry’s route-planning algorithms are beginning to rediscover. As traffic between Asia and Europe continues to reshape itself in the aftermath of geopolitical disruptions, the Western Balkans corridor is becoming strategically valuable in new ways. Slovenia, sitting at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, is itself deepening cooperation with ASEAN countries, and free trade agreement negotiations with Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia are all progressing in 2026. These are not abstract diplomatic gestures — they are the architecture of future aviation demand.

Ljubljana Airport, Belgrade, Tirana, Zagreb, Skopje, Sarajevo: none of these will be Dubai. But they do not need to be. What this region can offer is something different — a network of smaller, nimble, well-located gateways that serve year-round connectivity, regional tourism, diaspora markets, and the emerging business corridors of a more multipolar world. Small airports have historically underperformed in direct and indirect connectivity across Europe, and that gap is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is infrastructure investment. The opportunity is that these airports are not congested, not constrained by slot controls, not priced out of reach for airlines willing to try something new.

THE NEXT FRONTIER IS BETWEEN THE DISCIPLINES

I want to close with the argument I find most exciting — and the one I believe the aviation industry in this region is least prepared for.

The next generation of meaningful innovation in aviation and travel will not come primarily from within aviation. It will come from the edges: from biotech-informed wellness experiences reshaping what airports offer; from quantum computing beginning to optimize route networks in ways current algorithms cannot; from eVTOL cargo aircraft entering real-world commercial operations; from AI systems that manage crew scheduling, predictive maintenance, and personalised passenger experience in simultaneous, integrated ways. It will come from architects designing terminals that function as urban ecosystems. From agricultural scientists reimagining airport land use. From game designers building the loyalty platforms that generate more airline revenue than seat sales alone.

Future innovations will be born in the spaces between disciplines. The question is not whether Southeast Europe’s aviation community understands this — it is whether it is positioned to act on it.

This is precisely what drives our work at the Slovenian Aviation and Travel Industry Summit. When we bring together IATA economists, the CEO of Air Serbia, the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ljubljana, the founder of Pipistrel electric aircraft, Boeing commercial teams, Embraer regional aviation specialists, Fraport airport operators, and travel agency leaders into the same room, we are not just running a conference program. We are creating the conditions for the cross-disciplinary collisions that produce real change. The insights do not come from any single panel. They come from what happens between the panels — from the conversation between an airline CEO and a software engineer, between a tourism board director and an ATM/CNS specialist, between a young startup founder and an investor who had never previously looked at Southeast Europe.

A FINAL WORD ON CONFIDENCE

I have watched this region struggle with a particular kind of institutional self-deprecation — the reflex of saying “but we are only a small market” before anyone has asked the question. I understand where it comes from. Decades of comparative underinvestment, political instability, and the gravitational pull of larger neighbors have left their marks.

But the data does not support the self-deprecation anymore. The growth is real. The talent is real. The geographic advantage is real. The creative energy that has produced Air Serbia, ETF Airways, Pipistrel, and the emerging green airport movement across Albania, Montenegro, and beyond is real.

What this region needs now is not more modesty. It needs more audacity — the specific audacity of people who understand their constraints, refuse to be defined by them, and build something genuinely new in the space between what they have and what they imagine.

That is the conversation I am committed to continuing in Ljubljana on June 2, 2026. I hope you will join it.

Olga Rybak is the CEO of ato comm and Founder of the Slovenian Aviation and Travel Industry Summit, held annually in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Summit’s second edition takes place on 2 June 2026 at the Intercontinental Ljubljana.