Central and Eastern European ULCC Wizz Air this week plans to restart selected routes from London Luton and Vienna, subject to no further government restrictions being put in place.
The latest expansion and the flights to two new European capitals will increase the Wizz Air network to 116 airports across 38 countries as it continues its rapid growth. Its departure capacity has grown at an average annual rate of 64.4 per cent between 2005 and 2104 from just over 2.5 million seats to almost 17.5 million last year. This year capacity will grow by an estimated 24.0 per cent to over 21.5 million departure seats.
Irish budget carrier, Ryanair is to significantly grow its activities from Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle airports in the UK next year, introducing a total of ten new routes from the three facilities as part of an expanded offering from the summer schedule.
The arrival of the single 737-800 will facilitate the introduction of new links to Corfu from Birmingham, Bratislava, Budapest, Cologne, Rome, Katowice, Poznan, Pisa, Rzeszow, Venice and Warsaw Modlin as well as enable increased frequencies on its existing routes from Brussels Charleroi, East Midlands, London Stansted and Milan Bergamo.
Niki said at the time the flights were announced that it believed there would be sufficient demand for the short flights, which despite a 25 minute block time were estimated to be just ten minutes in length. The majority of this demand would have been to feed its wider network from Vienna International Airport, according to the carrier.
With five based aircraft, Berlin will become the airlines’ 73rd base, and will see the launch of sixteen new routes, bringing the total number of destinations to 22.
Ryanair will be basing an additional Boeing 737-800 at Athens International Airport during summer 2015, increasing its based fleet to four aircraft and plans to double its Athens traffic to approximately 2.2 million passengers per annum.
The Austrian low-cost carrier is to launch flights from Bratislava to Brussels and Palma in summer 2015 and to facilitate its new services will operate one of the shortest international flights in the world between its base in Vienna and the Slovakian capital.
Ryanair has been serving MR Štefánik Airport for almost ten years and is now firmly established as the largest scheduled operator with a 79.1 per cent share of departures and 93.2 share of capacity this month.
