Air Algérie, the flag carrier of Algeria, will restart flights to Alicante, in Spain’s eastern coast. The Spanish coast city will be connected, starting on July 15, to Algiers and Oran. The news was announced by Air Algérie on its Twitter page and confirmed by this week’s Cirium Diio Mi application update.
While Algiers will be connected to Alicante on Wednesdays, the flight to Oran will be twice weekly, on Mondays and Saturdays. Flights are already on sale in the airline’s sales channels, and domestic connections are also available.
The flights will be operated by the airline’s Boeing 737-800, which can carry 16 passengers in Business Class and 132 in Economy, until October 28; the airline’s operations from Alicante were halted during the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020.
Air Algérie in Spain
This will be the second destination in Spain restarted by Air Algérie — the airline returned to its Algiers-Barcelona flights in 2021. However, it is still far from the capacity levels it supplied to the Spanish market in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic.
According to data gathered with Cirium’s Diio Mi application, in 2019 it flew 492,072 seats to Spain in eight different routes. For 2023, if there are no changes, it expects to fly 95,052 seats, a reduction of 80.7%.
Air Algérie’s supply of seats in 2023, however, is a mere 1.8% down compared to 2019, which means the airline shifted most of this capacity elsewhere — its main international growth levers in absolute numbers, according to Cirium, have been France, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
Still, Spain hosts an important part of the Algerian diaspora, with 63,964 Algerians living in the country, according to data by the National Institute of Statistics. The province with the most Algerians, the data shows, is precisely Alicante, with 15,483.
While Algeria has been motioning towards an opening for international tourism, it has largely remained a closed country. With this, Air Algérie is by far the largest airline to and from Algeria — supplying over 8.7 million of the almost 14.4 million seats in the market this year –, with a particular focus on the diaspora in Europe and in domestic services.
