Weekly flights from Finland to Eilat to resume
After nine-year break, Finnish company Aurinkomatkat to resume its flights to Israeli resort city this winter. Estonian tour company Horizon Travel, purchased by Aurinkomatkat, will operate direct flights from Tallinn to Eilat
The Tourism Ministry has announced another step in its marketing activity focusing on increasing tourism to Eilat: Starting this coming winter: A weekly flight from Estonia and two weekly flights from Finland will arrive in the southern resort city.
Following a nine-year break, Finnish tour company Aurinkomatkat has decided to resume its flights from Finland's capital Helsinki to Israel. In addition, after purchasing an Estonian tour company called Horizon Travel, it will also operate direct flights to Israel from the Estonian capital of Tallinn.
Between the months of October and December, the company will operate a weekly charter flight on the Tallinn-Eilat line. The plane has 180 seats, and the flight will take off every Sunday. This flight joins a series of charter flights operated by the company from Helsinki and from the Russian city of St. Petersburg to Israel.
The Tourism Ministry's bureau in Scandinavia is continuing its activity aimed at encouraging tourism from Estonia to Israel, focusing on Eilat. In addition, an event organized by the bureau and the Eilat Hotels Association will be held in Estonia at the end of September and is expected to be attended by more than 100 travel agents.
Two weekly flights on the Helsinki-Eilat line will be operated from October till April, thanks to the convenient weather in the Israeli resort city during the winter season and the demand for recreation and leisure tourism.
These flights will join 12 charter flights on the Helsinki-Tel Aviv line, aimed at meeting the demand for religious-historic tourism.
Rise in number of Nordic tourists
The Tourism Ministry's bureau in Scandinavia will hold a week of seminars for travel agents and priests in Finland in August. The seminars will be held in six of the countries main cities, and each meeting is expected to be attended by 50 people who will be presented with the Jewish state's sites, attractions and visiting possibilities.
"The Tourism Ministry will continue its activity to 'open the skies' in a bid to remove the obstacles faced by the tourism movement to Israel and increase the flight capacity, so that we can expand the movement of tourism both from countries working with Israel and from new destinations," said Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov.
Some 30,000 tourists from Nordic countries visited Israel in the first half of 2009 – a 7% increase compared to the same period last year. This figure includes more than 9,000 tourists from Finland (a 71% rise), about 8,000 from Sweden, some 6,000 from Norway, 5,500 from Denmark and a few hundreds from Iceland.
