Vueling Outlines Major Expansion from Barcelona Base

Spanish budget carrier Vueling has announced a major expansion at its home base airport, Barcelona El Prat, where it will invest around €325 million to bring five additional aircraft into its fleet to expand its summer network by around 50 per cent by introducing an additional 23 routes. This represents the biggest single investment by the carrier in Spain’s second city since it was merged with its former rival clickair in 2009.

Vueling, which is partly-owned by the country’s national carrier Iberia, will introduce four more Airbus A320s and a single A319 at El Prat increasing its based fleet to 28 units. These additional short-haul jets will enable the carrier to expand its network to 70 destinations during summer 2012. The airline has seen very little network growth since it was established in its present form. In 2009 there was consolidation following the merger with clickair and this continued through 2010. Although growth returned last year it was modest with the addition of just three new routes. Now Vueling will expand its network by 17.5 per cent after revealing plans to add flights to Almeria, Lanzarote, San Sebastian (all in Spain), Lourdes (France), Malmö (Sweden), Nuremberg (Germany), Edinburgh and Southampton (UK), Stavanger (Norway) and Split (Croatia).

These are in addition to the 13 new routes it has already announced. The full list, along with operational dates and frequencies is highlighted in the table, below…

Vueling is the largest operator at Barcelona El Prat but has come under increasing pressure over the past couple of years as rival budget airlines have expanded at the facility. It currently operates over 3,000 departures per week from the airport offering around 507,000 seats, 22.1 per cent of the available weekly capacity. Its largest rivals are Spanair (13.4 per cent), Ryanair (12.0 per cent), Iberia (9.9 per cent) and easyJet (6.6 per cent).

Its main expansion will be into the French market where it will expand its network from four to eleven destinations, while a growth in the UK will see the airline resume flights to Edinburgh and launch new services to Southampton and Cardiff (the latter becoming a new focus city with flights also being added from Alicante and Palma de Mallorca). Vueling will also offer its first links from Barcelona to destinations in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Alongside the new routes, Vueling will also increase capacity in many of its existing markets, including an increase of 56,000 available seats between Barcelona and Milan. Other destinations to see capacity increases include Bordeaux, Genoa, Las Palmas, Moscow, Pisa, Tenerife and the French city of Toulouse where the budget carrier has one of its few international bases.

With its revised network Vueling claims it now has one of the strongest short-haul networks from a hub airport in Europe. When considering routes of less than 2,900km in distance, only Lufthansa at Frankfurt (98 short-haul routes), Air France at Paris CDG (79 short-haul routes) and Iberia at Madrid Barajas (79 short-haul routes) serve more markets.

Barcelona is not alone in witnessing growth and Vueling will also expand its activities at other locations across Europe with a network wide capacity growth of 16 per cent. An additional 21 new summer routes will be offered this year and will be supported by the opening of a new base at Palma Son Sant Joan on the island of Mallorca in the Balearics. The airline will introduce seven new routes from Palma to Alicante, Bordeaux, Cardiff, Lyon, Nice and Tenerife. The Russian capital, Moscow, will also be served from the island as well as Ibiza as the carrier introduces more than 21,000 seats to serve the increasing demand for air travel between Russia and the Balearic Islands.

Elsewhere in Spain, Vueling will introduce new flights from Bilbao to Berlin, Paris and Santorini and from Alicante the previously mentioned new links to Cardiff and Palma de Mallorca will be launched, while frequencies to Ibiza and Paris will also grow.

The growth is not just restricted to Vueling’s home market and it will significantly expand its activities at Paris Orly in France. Four new routes will be introduced to Bilbao, Florence, Lisbon and Vienna, while frequencies will be increased to both Alicante and Palma. According to the carrier it will offer 1,691, 712 seats from the Parisian airport this summer, 331,812 more than in summer 2011.