Podgorica Airport hopes the upcoming opening of Wizz Air’s base in the Montenegrin capital will help it win back some of the 140,000 Montenegrin nationals who used the fast-growing Tirana Airport in 2025. The head of operator Airports of Montenegro, Roko Tolić, recently said, “We need to be at least as attractive as our competitors. Right now, we’re caught in a kind of squeeze between Dubrovnik and Tirana. We’ll try to change that, while taking into account the company, our capabilities and the public interest”. He added, “What hurts is the number of citizens from Montenegro that travel to Tirana to find their onward connections there. That’s one of the issues I’m expected to solve, and one of the reasons I was appointed as Executive Director of Airports of Montenegro”.
In 2025, almost 140.000 Montenegrin citizens flew to or from Tirana Airport, representing a 14% increase on the previous year. This figure does not include travellers from Montenegro with foreign passports. The most popular destinations with Montenegrin passengers from Tirana were those to Italy and Spain. Commenting on the upcoming Wizz Air base in Podgorica, the General Manager of Tirana Airport, Piervittorio Farabbi, said, “I believe the new capacity in Podgorica will be complementary for the entire region, especially for markets such as Italy, Germany and France, and that we should all be grateful for Wizz Air’s focus on the Western Balkans. In addition, with the new portfolio of destinations in Podgorica and Tirana, we could also see demand diversify, particularly when it comes to tourism options”.
Wizz Air will open a base in Podgorica this March launching fifteen new routes in the process. New destinations include Barcelona, Basel, Beauvais, Baden Baden, Cologne, Hamburg, Rome Fiumicino, Gdansk, Maastricht, Malmo, Poznan, Rzeszow, Ljubljana, Vilnius and Wrocław. Wizz Air will compete directly against flag carrier Air Montenegro on services to Rome and Ljubljana, as well as Ryanair to Gdansk and Wroclaw. The new routes will join the already served Budapest, Dortmund, Memmingen and Milan Malpensa on a year-round basis, as well as Katowice, London Gatwick and Warsaw seasonally. The airline plans to have two Airbus A321neo aircraft based in the city, with a number of routes launching in late March and a second batch in June. Wizz Air handled just over 360.000 passengers on its Podgorica operations in 2025.
