Dec. 14—WARSAW — Poland's flagship airline LOT expects to handle some 2 million passengers in 2020, compared to the pre-Covid-19 plan to handle 12 million passengers, the company's spokesperson said on Monday.
The pandemic and the resulting reduced scale of operations put the company "back nearly 10 years."
"It remains to be seen how fast will we be able to return to the level of passengers handled ... last year," spokesperson Krzysztof Moczulski said, as cited by PAP agency.
The firm hopes that demand for air travel will gradually start increasing as of the beginning of the 2021 summer season, Moczulski said.
In 2019, LOT handled over 10 million passengers for the first time ever.
At the beginning of the year, the Polish airline planned to take over German charter airline Condor, but the deal fell apart during the global Covid-19 health crisis, with LOT stepping back because of problems of its own.
In mid-November, Poland's Deputy Prime Minister Jacek Sasin announced that Poland is preparing a multibillion aid package to the state-controlled airline.
Government officials praised LOT's management for reducing costs and re-negotiating deals with plane leasing firms during the pandemic downtime.
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