The OnBoard Courier for Croatia

After it come Split (SPU) with 67 destinations and about 73.6 departures a day and Dubrovnik (DBV) with 70 destinations and about 69.2 departures a day. Those are the alternates. When the primary gateway is shut by weather, a strike or a curfew, they are what a courier is rebooked through. Between them the 3 airports in Croatia that publish departures schedule about 219.4 movements a day and reach 201 separate destinations, counting each city once per airport.

Reach matters more than frequency for a hand carry, because a courier flies whatever is leaving. From ZAG alone, 918 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 64 served nonstop. A gateway that multiplies its own reach that far with one change is a hub in the useful sense: almost anywhere is two boarding passes away. It is computed from the scheduled network rather than from a booking engine.

10 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 8 domestic destinations. That matters on a hand carry because it decides whether the last leg can be flown or has to be driven. A consignee outside the gateway city is then a connecting flight, not a four hour drive.

Outside its own borders the country is tied most closely to Germany, about 35.2 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 26.7 flights a day, France, about 17.2 flights a day, Spain, about 14.9 flights a day and Poland, about 11 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Croatia without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Croatia to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

48 airlines fly out of Croatia in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Croatia Airlines on 54 routes, Ryanair on 53 routes, easyJet on 22 routes, Jet2 on 14 routes and Volotea on 14 routes. The carrier matters to a hand carry more than it does to freight, because cabin baggage rules, what counts as an acceptable carry on item and whether an extra seat can be bought are set by the airline and not by the airport.

The longest single sector out of ZAG in this data runs to Seoul, South Korea (ICN), 8,445 km by great circle. Great circle is not a flown distance and will read short against a real routing, but it is the honest way to state a reach: it says what one aircraft does without stopping, which is exactly the question a courier desk is asking.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 3 Atlas entries and 1 airport page for Croatia, and every one of them is linked from this page. That is the point of a country index: the material exists, it was written one page at a time, and until now there was no single place that connected it.

Alongside the reference material there is the country desk page and the courier recruitment page for people who already fly this market. The coverage here is thin, and saying so is more useful than padding it. What exists is accurate; what is missing is missing because nothing on this desk has been written about it yet.