Less than two months after Poland became the 39th country to be added to the US visa waiver program, LOT Polish Airlines has unveiled plans to further expand its operations to the country.
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Wizz Air will inaugurate twice weekly flights between Warsaw and Agadir from June 30, 2017, its first scheduled flights into the continent since it served Hurghada in Egypt back in 2014 and 2015.
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Warsaw was one of the first destinations Wizz Air brought its low fares to in 2004 and since then it has carried more than 13 million passengers on a network that has grown to 48 routes across 25 countries, growing annual numbers beyond the 1.5 million figure last year.
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Wizz Air introduced a twice weekly Birmingham – Warsaw route from September 14, 2015 and a twice weekly Budapest – Birmingham service from September 15, 2015 becoming the seventh new carrier to arrive at Birmingham in 2015.
Air Canada will use its leisure airline, Air Canada rouge to add flights to Budapest, Glasgow and Warsaw and resume a link to Prague last served in the 1970s, while Air Transat will offer new flights from Canada to Glasgow, Nice, Pisa, Rome and Zagreb.
The Polish flag carrier will introduce two additional weekly frequencies to both Chicago and New York from late October 2016 as it aims to become the leading carrier in New Europe (Central and Eastern Europe).
Wizz will start flights to Warsaw and Budapest from the West Midlands-based airport from September, as the airline progresses towards operating from primary airports within the UK.
It has been a massive couple of years for LOT as it continues its restructuring to return the Star Alliance member to sustainable profitability. Its future was effectively safeguarded last summer when the European Commission formally approved its restructuring plan and ruled the PLN 804 million (around €200 million) of state aid granted to the carrier lawful in terms of the provisions of EU legislation.
Updated schedules for the remainder of the year show the Gulf carrier will switch the aircraft type deployed on the routes to Budapest’s Ferenc Liszt International Airport and Warsaw’s Chopin Airport from its smallest aircraft, the Airbus A330-200, to a larger Boeing 777-300ER. The change will take effect from December 1, 2015.
Latest data for March 2015 shows the airport handled 804,300 passengers during the month, a 10.5 per cent growth year-on-year. It was the first March in its history that the Warsaw airport broke the 800,000 passenger mark and the sixth straight month of record-breaking figures for Warsaw Chopin Airport, continuing a trend started in October 2014.
Wizz Air first launched operations in Poland in 2004 and has subsequently built up a strong presence in the country over the subsequent eleven years. As a result of these latest network additions it will now offer a total of 113 Polish routes to 20 countries from seven Polish airports.
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LOT has been in financial difficulties for several years, reporting significant losses and negative equity, but in 2013 it recorded for the first time in five years a net profit of PLN 26 million, instead of almost PLN 200 million loss envisaged in the Restructuring Plan presented to the European Commission. This was its first annual net profit since 2007.
