Lot planes will be travelling more between Polish cities Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

National carrier Lot wants to strengthen its position on the market by convincing Poles to take more domestic flights.

The company recently announced that it will introduce connections between regional airports, bypassing Warsaw.

“The idea do develop the regional connections network is a way to quickly strengthen Lot's presence in Poland,” Sebastian Mikosz, the company's president, told Gazeta Wyborcza.

“We want to show that there is a means of transport that allows one to get from for example from Gdańsk to Kraków or Katowice in 1 hr 15 minutes.”

The company is planning to offer domestic flights bypassing Warsaw in its winter connections network and is currently in talks with airports in Wrocław, Poznań and Kraków.

While domestic flights are popular in other parts of Europe, Poles still prefer trains or cars to travel around the country. The daily quoted data by Avinor, a national Norwegian company managing 46 airports, according to which 65 percent of passengers in Norway fly on domestic flights – out of the 37.9 million passengers served by Norwegian airports in 2009, 24.7 million were traveling on domestic flights.

Meanwhile, according to Polish statistics, only under a million passengers out of the 18.9 million served by Polish airport last year flew on domestic flights.

According to Katarzyna Krasnodębska, spokesperson for the Polish Civil Aviation Office, Poles don't want to fly domestic because they have little to choose from and because of the high ticket prices cause by the lack of competition.