Airlines' 'summer' schedules start in late March and run until late October. For this period, the AECFA association for time slots in Spain reports that 30,783,365 seats (arrivals and departures) are being programmed for Palma Son Sant Joan Airport. This number of seats, assuming they were to all be occupied, would exceed the total number of passengers at the airport for the whole of 2019 - a record 29.7 million. The number of flights is set to increase from 169,041 in summer 2019 to 171,674.
For the four main summer months - June to September - there is an average increase of ten per cent, the programming a clear reflection of holiday demand. Despite less than favourable economic conditions, the travel associations in the two main tourism markets - ABTA (UK) and DRV (Germany) - as well as tour operators have all been pointing to very optimistic forecasts for this summer.
German flights represent a third of the scheduled seats. For the UK, the second largest foreign market, Jet2holidays have announced that they will be offering 650,000 arrival seats for Palma, almost 50,000 more than last summer, and with a peak of 146 weekly flights. Jet2, it was recently reported, have overtaken Tui as the UK's leading tour operator.