Winter has not arrived, but tour operators are already taking positions for next summer. And if the forecasts come true, the 2024 summer season will be busy at the Alicante-Elche-Miguel Hernández airport. The airline Scandinavian Airlines -SAS- has just announced its flight plan and is going to increase its weekly connections with the Costa Blanca from seven destinations in Sweden, Norway and Copenhagen.
Even before the start of summer, between April and June, SAS increases the number of weekly flights to Stockholm, which will go from seven to eight. In addition, in July and August there will continue to be 14 flights linking the Alicante airfield with the Swedish capital.
Also in summer it will add two flights to the Danish and Norwegian capitals, up to seven with Copenhagen and eight with Oslo each week. And it will increase a connection to the Norwegian cities of Bergen, for a total of six, Kristiansand and Trondheim, where it goes from one to two.
SAS will operate throughout the summer season between Alicante-Elche and the Swedish city of Gothenburg, with three connections and will maintain the six flights with the Norwegian Stavanger that it already managed last summer.
The Scandinavian market is one of the most faithful to the Costa Blanca. Of the 11,231,792 foreign passengers that the Miguel Hernández airport received in 2022, 1,329,909 came from Norway (774,039) and Sweden (555,870), a joint figure that only the United Kingdom surpassed, with 4.6 million.
Both countries also have a very significant colony of residents: there are 5,337 Norwegians and 4,150 Swedes who are officially established in the province of Alicante. In the town of l'Alfàs del Pi alone there are 2,500 registered residents, but it is estimated that including those not registered the number of residents may be around 8,000. In fact, almost half of the 11,500 Norwegians registered in Spain reside in Alicante.
Regarding the Swedes, they are more dispersed, there are more of them in the country as a whole, they exceed 21,000 registered, and they have Alicante as their second favorite province, because there are more who prefer the Costa del Sol: there are 7,454 Swedes registered in Malaga.
