Annika has been part of the Route Development team for more than 10 years, and has seen the value in building long-term relationships within the industry. Annika hopes to spark more great relationships at Routes Asia and is busy preparing business cases for the event in March.

Tell us about your role

As Senior Route Development Manager for Asia, I’m the go-to person for our Asian airline partners, both our new and existing customers. I’m here to guide them to the right person and help find solutions for their operations here in Copenhagen. My most important task is to develop current and new traffic to CPH from Asia with the airlines, and I spend most of my time building business cases to support the route opportunities we see. I’ve been part of the Route Development Team at Copenhagen Airport for 11 years in a variety of roles, including being responsible for the Americas, LCCs and for our cooperation with SAS.  

What is the best part of your job?

One of the best parts is getting to meet and engage with so many interesting people from all over the world and build up great long-term relationships. In this business, your contacts are always moving around, so good relationships are very important.

And the worst?

I’m actually not very fond of flying, which is a bit funny in this line of work, but I manage!  

What are you working on right now?

I’m getting ready for Routes Asia in March, where I look forward to meeting representatives from Asian airlines. The meetings are very short, speed-dating style meetings, so we don’t want to overwhelm people with hundreds of slides! Instead, we’re really boiling down our business cases to just two pages with only the most essential performance indicators, including trends, traffic analysis, connection analysis and what Asian travellers can see and experience in Copenhagen. I’m always very interested in hearing their thoughts, so I’ll also be asking a lot of questions.

What are your industry predictions for the new year and beyond?

I think we’ll see a lot of focus on environmental issues in our industry – this year and going forward. As an industry, we need to step up and show that we can support greener travel, and that’s something we’re working with a lot here in CPH Airport. Longer term, I think we’ll see new ways of travelling develop – not just by train and electric car, but more sustainable ways to fly too.

Overall, I think we’ll still see positive development, just at a slower pace than before, and with a focus on the environment. I would love to see one or two more long haul routes to Asia in the not too distant future!