Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines joint-venture leisure carrier SunExpress is planning to add two UK destinations every year, after rapidly growing its UK capacity to 1.3 million seats since 2022.
“We selectively flew to the UK before summer 2022, but summer 2022 was really the milestone when it all started. We operated into five airports in 2022, and then you can add two airports every year,” SunExpress CEO Max Kownatzki told delegates at the Aviation Club of the UK in London.
SunExpress’ five initial UK destinations in 2022 were Birmingham, England; Edinburgh, Scotland; London Gatwick, London Luton and Manchester, England. In 2023, Bristol and Newcastle—both in England—were added, taking the airline to seven destinations. This year, that grew to nine destinations, with the launch of services to Leeds Bradford and London Stansted. The airline now offers 136 weekly flights between Turkey and the UK.
“We started with 400,000 seats, went to roughly doubling of that to 750,000 seats the year after, and we're shooting for 1.3 million seats this year,” Kownatzki said.
By peak summer, the airline will be operating 136 weekly flights to the UK across 21 nonstop routes. This is up from 73 weekly flights during peak summer 2023. New routes from Turkey for the season include Dalaman-Edinburgh, Adana-London Stansted, Antalya-Stansted, Antalya-Leeds Bradford and Gaziantep-London Stansted.
Around 85% of SunExpress’ ticket revenue comes from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, but the UK has become its next largest market. Once all the viable UK destinations have been exhausted, SunExpress will add frequencies and upgauge its aircraft to add more seats.
UK traffic is helping SunExpress diversity its product from sun and beach holidays to activity-based travel, such as golfing holidays breaks, which increase ancillary revenues and yield. SunExpress is also hoping to tap the market for archaeological, culinary, cultural and religious tourism, as well as winter soccer and tennis training camps to balance seasonality.
As part of this strategy, SunExpress has established a “counter-seasonality” taskforce, which led to the damp-lease placement of four Boeing 737-800s with South African Airways (SAA) this winter, and to SunExpress cabin crew being seconded to do maritime cruise work during the low season.
“We've also seen that a lot of growth comes from expanding and extending the summer season. Traditionally, we have quite a drop after October. We've now added 2,000 additional flights just from October to December last year—that's 380,000 seats—so the summer season is lasting longer.”
Antalya-based SunExpress will add two new routes for winter 2024-25: one connecting the Turkish capital Antalya with Stansted, and another linking Izmir with Gatwick. From summer 2025, the carrier will serve Antalya-Liverpool 3X-weekly. Flights will also be offered from Glasgow Airport to Antalya and Dalaman from next April.
“We were at 101% of [available seat kilometers] in 2021 already—compared with pre-pandemic levels—122% in 2022, and 146% last year,” Kownatzki said. “We've grown at 10%-12% every year, despite a military coup in 2016 and an earthquake last year. Turkey is an absolute rebound country, with average growth rates in the last 35 years of 10%-12% every year.”
Aside from a short-lived Moscow service in 2017-18, SunExpress did not operate into Russia before the Ukraine conflict, and Kownatzki said the Israel-Gaza war has only had a “negligible impact” on their operations.
This year, SunExpress will operate a total network of 200 routes to 68 destinations in 35 countries.
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