Skopje and Ohrid airports concession to TAV Macedonia
The government of North Macedonia handed both of the country's international airports, Skopje and Ohrid, to the concessionaire TAV Macedonia in 2010, and combined passenger traffic rose from 729,297 in 2010 to 3,475,288 in 2025.
3,475,288 passengers, passengers at skopje and ohrid airports combined, 2025. 729,297 passengers, passengers at skopje and ohrid airports combined, first year of the concession, 2010. TAV Macedonia, press release on 2025 traffic at Skopje and Ohrid airports, retrieved 2026-10-17.
The move, and what it needed
The government tendered the operation of both national airports as one 20-year concession, so a single private operator carried the terminal build and the route development and paid the state from traffic it grew.
Preconditions
- An airport system small enough to bundle into one concession
- Latent demand from a large diaspora and underserved low-cost routes
- A government willing to renegotiate scope by annex when an obligation stopped making sense
Limits: Both numbers come from the concessionaire's own press releases, not from the state or a statistical office, and the 2010 figure sits on a second TAV page (airports.com.mk, release 'Five years of TAV in Macedonia'). The tier is the closest available for an operator's traffic count; a reviewer may prefer to treat it as self-reporting. Passenger growth mostly reflects low-cost carrier entry and diaspora travel, and the record cannot separate what the concession contributed from what any operator of the two airports would have seen. Passengers measure throughput, not the quality of the partnership. The concession also lost part of its scope: the cargo airport at Shtip that TAV was obliged to build was declared not economically justifiable in 2020, and the government diverted the 49.7 million euros planned for it to other projects through an annex (Meta.mk, 21 September 2020, reporting the economy minister). The amount TAV actually invested against its original commitment is not published at either source. Two airports in a small country is national in reach but a narrow slice of the construct.