Florence Is Getting Four New Foreign Cities in Three Days

Volotea will add four international routes from Florence between 21 and 23 September, an unusually compressed launch even by low-cost standards. Seville gets three flights a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Strasbourg and Berlin each get two, on Wednesdays and Sundays. Valencia gets two, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. All four begin within a 72-hour window, which is less a marketing flourish than a consequence of how the aircraft rotations have been built: the schedule only works if the whole block starts together.

Underpinning the expansion is a second Volotea aircraft based at Florence Peretola. A based aircraft is a bigger commitment than a route, because it puts crew, maintenance arrangements and overnight parking in the city rather than flying them in. It also changes the shape of the timetable, since a locally based jet can fly the first departure of the morning and the last arrival of the evening. That is what turns a leisure route into something a resident of Tuscany can actually use for a two-night trip.

With the additions, Florence will offer flights to sixteen destinations across Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic. The airport has always been constrained by its short runway and its position in a valley on the edge of the city, which limits it to smaller aircraft and keeps larger carriers at Pisa, an hour away by road or rail. Volotea’s fleet fits Peretola’s limits, and the airline has spent several years quietly building the kind of network the airport’s geography allows.

For travellers, the practical effect is that Florence becomes reachable without a connection from four more European cities, and Tuscany becomes a weekend rather than a week. Seville and Valencia matter for Spanish visitors who currently route through Rome or Milan. Strasbourg opens a corner of eastern France that has almost no direct Italian service. Berlin is the largest market of the four and the one most likely to fill year-round. Whether all four survive their first winter is the usual open question with launches of this size.

Sources: Aviation24.be, Aviation Week