Arkia Israeli Airlines touched down at Vilnius Airport for the first time on May 21, launching direct scheduled service between Tel Aviv and Lithuania’s capital on a four-hour route operating three times a week through October 4. The debut arrives as passenger traffic on the Lithuania-Israel corridor surged past 70,000 in 2025, almost three times the count recorded in 2024, pulling a second Israeli carrier to Vilnius alongside Israir, which had resumed flights just seven days earlier.
The Route That Charter Traffic Built
This corridor has a three-year backstory. Israeli tour operator Overseas, a Tel Aviv-based outbound travel firm, began running charter-flight groups to Lithuania in 2024, the country’s first consistent Israeli visitor program. That first season converted a country with minimal Israeli visitor presence into a tracked, bookable summer destination. A second season followed in 2025. By 2026, Overseas had moved its core product onto Arkia’s scheduled service, putting Lithuanian hotels onto Israeli booking platforms alongside Prague, Rome, and Amsterdam.
The shift from charter-only to scheduled service matters for route visibility. Scheduled flights appear on Israeli travel-booking engines in real time, open to individual ticketing. Charter packages existed only through Overseas’s own brochure. Lithuania is now bookable on any Israeli phone with a standard flight-search app.
As the first Israeli tour operator to recognize the immense potential of Lithuania for the Israeli travelers, we are thrilled to kick off our third consecutive season of operations this time with Arkia Airlines who are launching their direct route from Tel Aviv to Vilnius.
Pini Krainer, Co-CEO of Overseas, said that at the inaugural ceremony, where the arriving aircraft was greeted with a traditional water-cannon arch from the airport fire rescue team. Per Vilnius Airport’s route-launch announcements, Arkia joins Israir, which restarted three weekly Tel Aviv flights on May 14.
Simonas Bartkus, CEO of Lithuanian Airports (LTOU, the state company managing Vilnius, Kaunas, and Palanga airports), welcomed Arkia as “the second airline from Israel at Vilnius Airport” and called the Lithuania-Israel corridor “our growing and promising market.” Two Israeli scheduled carriers active simultaneously on a sub-four-hour sector to a Baltic capital is a threshold the route had not previously crossed. Flights run Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.
Arkia’s 40-Route Summer Push
Vilnius sits within the broadest schedule Arkia has ever operated. The airline, Israel’s third-largest carrier, was founded in 1949 as Israel Inland Airlines and spent its first decades on short domestic routes. At a Tel Aviv press conference in February, it announced a spring-summer 2026 network of roughly 40 international destinations, including first-time routes to Phuket in Thailand and Malaga in Spain, resumed service to Ibiza, and the debut of business class on European routes, beginning with Paris at $850 one-way.
- New this summer: Phuket (Thailand), Vilnius (Lithuania), Malaga (Spain, first time), Ibiza (Spain, resumed)
- Business class debut: Paris route, 12 seats per A320 flight at $850 one-way
- Transatlantic: New York, six times weekly
- Long-haul Asia: Bangkok and Hanoi (existing), Phuket (new)
- Total network: 41 international destinations across 25 countries as of June 2026
CEO Oz Berlowitz has called the summer schedule consistent with “a strategic plan to expand the destination map and deepen long-haul activity,” and said the airline ended 2025 with nearly 70% year-on-year passenger growth, a result of filling the vacuum left when most international carriers suspended Ben-Gurion Airport service after October 2023. When Arkia entered the New York market in February 2025, only El Al was flying the route and economy fares had climbed to $6,000 to $7,000. That run gave Arkia the operational experience and revenue base to execute the current network. Vilnius fits the same routing logic: a four-hour sector from Ben-Gurion that serves a growing Israeli leisure market with no widebody requirement and a partner operator that already has hotel and ground contracts in place. Among Western carriers still absent from Ben-Gurion, American Airlines has extended its New York-Ben-Gurion suspension through January 2027, leaving Israeli carriers in effective control of most direct transatlantic service for the near term.
The 70,000 Passenger Milestone
Bartkus’s figure of 70,000-plus Lithuania-Israel passengers in 2025 implies roughly 23,000 to 24,000 made the same trip in 2024, the charter-only first year. That 12-month jump requires more than one operator’s marketing budget. Vilnius carries a specific pull: the city was historically known as the “Jerusalem of the North,” a center of Talmudic scholarship built around the legacy of Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon. Before the Second World War, approximately 100,000 Jews lived in Vilnius, nearly half the city’s population. The Paneriai Memorial outside the city, where tens of thousands of Jews were killed between 1941 and 1944, and the ongoing archaeological excavation of the Great Synagogue of Vilna give the destination a historical dimension that converts single-visit groups into annual repeat bookings for Jewish heritage tour operators.
- 70,000+ passengers flew Lithuania-Israel in 2025
- ~3x increase versus 2024
- 2 Israeli carriers operating simultaneously at Vilnius, May 2026
- 4 hours approximate sector time, Tel Aviv to Vilnius
- 5 planned weekly frequencies at peak summer
Vered Schwartz, Co-CEO of Overseas, said the three-year track record “would not have been possible without our exceptional partners,” naming the Lithuanian Tourism Board, airport authorities, and local suppliers. She described Lithuania as “a major and highly valued destination for the Israeli market.”
Why the Baltics Are Winning Israeli Travelers
Israeli outbound travel logged 9 million trips in 2025, up 32% versus 2024 and within 2% of pre-war 2023 volumes, according to Israeli outbound travel market research from Eketter, a travel data firm. More than 90% of those trips were made by air, making direct flight availability the principal determinant of destination choice. Countries that added or restored direct Ben-Gurion service in 2025 saw the fastest Israeli visitor gains.
Among European and regional markets, the Baltic pull has structural drivers. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are NATO members and Schengen-zone countries, without the overtourism friction that complicates Israeli group travel in peak-summer Barcelona or Amsterdam. Small capitals with walkable Old Towns, amber coast beaches on the Curonian Spit (a UNESCO World Heritage site), and inland lake districts fit the five-day package format that Israeli travel agencies sell profitably. Lithuania specifically posted 21% growth in total international arrivals in Q1 2025, the fastest of any European country during that period, as tracked through Lithuania Travel’s tourism data dashboard.
| Destination | Israeli outbound growth, 2025 |
|---|---|
| United Arab Emirates | +80% |
| Hungary | +55% |
| Italy | +49% |
| Poland | +43% |
| Bulgaria | +40% |
| Lithuania (total international arrivals, Q1 2025) | +21% |
A preference for destinations perceived as genuinely welcoming to Israeli travelers has been a documented factor in booking decisions after years of regional conflict disrupting outbound aviation. Lithuania’s combination of Jewish historical significance, compact geography, and a Schengen entry stamp that an Israeli traveler already uses for the rest of Europe covers most of the criteria travel agents cite when pitching the country to clients.
Lithuania’s Airports Overtake Riga
LTOU handled a record 7.16 million passengers across its three airports in 2025, the strongest year in the operator’s history and the first time in more than two decades that Lithuania’s network surpassed Riga Airport for Baltic market share. The system captured 40.3% of Baltic passenger volume. Vilnius Airport alone handled 5.11 million travelers, up 6.4% year-on-year.
The milestone came under real disruption. Belarus launched contraband-carrying balloons across the border repeatedly between October and December 2025, forcing Vilnius airspace closures on more than a dozen occasions. LTOU’s total passed 7 million on December 23.
Two infrastructure completions supported the growth: a new departures terminal at Vilnius Airport, opened ahead of the 2025 summer peak, and a Kaunas Airport reconstruction that doubled capacity. The Vilnius terminal replaced a facility that had strained under the airport’s growing summer loads, and its completion gave incoming airlines a cleaner picture of what Lithuanian infrastructure could handle. New airline partnerships brought flydubai (opening a direct Vilnius-Dubai link with onward connections across the Emirates hub network), Israir, and now Arkia. Bartkus called the terminal investments “a solid foundation for further changes” and has named deepening airline relationships as LTOU’s primary objective for 2026.
Lithuania ranks third in all of Europe for growth in indirect connectivity, per data from Airports Council International Europe (ACI Europe), with indirect connections up 20% between 2024 and 2025 and running 5% above pre-pandemic levels, a result ACI Europe treats as exceptional in the broader European context.
From Three Flights to Near-Daily
Arkia launched at three weekly frequencies: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. The ramp to five flights a week during peak summer weeks, confirmed at the route opening, is what Krainer called “almost daily service,” a benchmark routes typically reach only after several consecutive seasons of proven demand.
Overseas built its tour packages around Vilnius Old Town, the Paneriai Memorial, Baltic amber beaches, and the forests of the Dzukija National Park, giving the destination enough variety for a five-day program without repetition. Three consecutive seasons of growing Israeli group arrivals at Lithuanian accommodation establishments suggest this format has found a sustainable audience. The firm says it “pioneered” the Lithuanian destination in the Israeli outbound market.
Between Israir and Arkia, the corridor will carry Israeli scheduled flights on six days a week during the July and August peak, a density the route had in no form two years ago. Juras Taminskas, Lithuania’s Minister of Transport and Communications, said the connection would “strengthen tourism, business and people-to-people relations between the two countries.” Schedules and fares are listed on Arkia’s official booking page. The season runs through October 4.
