Jet2 to Add East Midlands Link to Budapest

UK leisure carrier Jet2.com is to offer a further non-stop service from the UK to the Hungarian capital, Budapest during the winter 2013/2014 schedule. The airline has confirmed it will launch a new twice weekly link from East Midlands from November 8, 2013 adding to its existing flights from Edinburgh and Manchester. This will be the only scheduled link to the popular city break destination of Budapest after Ryanair ended a short-lived link from Birmingham last year. Jet2.com will also introduce a twice weekly link to Prague from East Midlands in November 2013.

“We’re thrilled to be the only airline to give travellers from East Midlands and Central England direct flights to this popular Central European cities, right from their doorstep,” said Steve Heapy, Chief Executive of Jet2.com and Jet2holidays. “We’ve made these routes available following huge customer demand so we are very confident they will be a great success.”

“We’re thrilled to be the only airline to give travellers from East Midlands and Central England direct flights to this popular Central European city, right from their doorstep.  We’ve made this route available following huge customer demand so we are very confident it will be a great success.”

Steve Heapy
Chief Executive Officer, Jet2.com and Jet2holidays

With Budapest hosting this year's Routes Europe event between May 12th and May 14th, The HUB looks in greater details at this route. Although the collapse of Malev Hungarian Airlines in early 2012 significantly impacted air links into the Eastern European country, the UK has remained well-linked to its capital city with low-cost carriers easyJet, Ryanair, Wizz Air and national carrier British Airways alongside Jet2.com in offering flights from a variety of airports. In 2012 a total of 707,239 seats were offered between the UK and Budapest, up 15.9 per cent on the previous year: an even more notable growth when you consider Malev had held a 15.3 per cent share of capacity in 2011. Ahead of this week’s Jet2.com announcement capacity was forecast to provisionally grow 1.2 per cent this year.

“We are delighted that Jet2.com has decided to operate a new route to and from East Midlands, an expanding UK regional airport. Not only will this have a positive impact on the local economy, but it will give the people of Budapest a much needed link to Central England,” said Kam Jandu, Director of Aviation, Budapest Airport.

Jet2.com is currently the smallest of the five airlines currently offering flights between the UK and Budapest. In the table below we look at seat capacity in this market and rank airlines by annual capacity share in 2012. Wizz Air with a regular flight to London Luton dominated the market with a 27.1 per cent capacity share followed by Ryanair with 24.9 per cent, British Airways with 22.9 per cent and easyJet with 3.6 per cent. Jet2.com had a 10.5 per cent share offering almost 75,000 seats in each direction.

According to MIDT data an estimated 1.15 million bi-directional O&D passengers travelled between the UK and Budapest in 2012, up from around 943,000 in 2011. Jet2.com carried approximately 72,000 passengers on its route between Manchester and Budapest and an estimated 31,000 on the link between Edinburgh and the Hungarian capital.