Professional paper
Summary: The economic justification of building the Rijeka - Krk airport
Boris Prikril
Abstract
The building of the Rijeka - Krk Airport has been one of the largest projects of investment building on the island of Krk up to now. It is important the North Adriatic area. Its full value will be seen only after building the bridge across to the island. The intial difficulties always encountered when building such large objects will gradually disappear while its advantages for the economy of the area will grow each day. The Krk Airport's runway stretches for 2,500 metres and is 45 metres wide. The Airport's position is very favourable as it is very close to the sea. It is well equipped with the most modern electronic devices and it will be in operation 24 hours a day. This new Airport is a link in a chain of coastal airports: Pula - Rijeka - Zadar - Split - Dubrovnik - Titograd. They are not more than 200 km distant one from another, and the service range of each is about 100 km. It will be economically important for turism, the hotel and catering business, trade, agencies, shipping, bus companies etc. It will open possibilities for employing a larger staff. Turism will, no doubt, profit most. The Airport will soon be included in turist development as it is in the centre of an area with large accomodation capacities. The building of an airport can be justified only in places where there is well developed turism, because very few turists use air traffic, and the number of such turists must be at least so large to enable economic operation of an airport. There are all the necessary conditions for developing air turism in the Kvarner and Istria area. This is based on the fact that there is a very fast air traffic development in the world today and, on the other hand, on very favourable experiences received from newly-opened airports in the Adriatic area. Air traffic in Yugoslavia has been increasing for years twice as fast as the world avarage, which in itself is very high. The conditions will improve each year because of new investments in building first category hotels, new roads and other important objects. So it will benefit the Airport as well as the economy of this area. The advantages of the Airport for turism are: it brings many upper-class turists who stay in the most expensive hotels, they spend about 40 per cent more a day than the avarage foreign turist, the number of turists coming outside the main season increases, there are new winter season possibilities, foreign air companies are included in turism etc. It will be possible to increase the Airport's economic usefulness by planning investments for hotel building projects in the vicinity from 30 to 50 km of the Airport, by building a bridge across to the island, by reconstructing roads, establishing connections with neighbouring islands, creating possibilities for pleasure excursions, building small harbours for sailing boats, and similar projects. All this will increase the traffic of the new Airport.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
324409
URI
Publication date:
22.4.1970.
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