This week: Frontier brings the first new mainline service between San Antonio, Texas and Ontario, California; Budapest gets an Agadir link; and Juneyao increases its Philippines focus.
As foreign competitors continue to erode flag carrier El Al’s market share, Routesonline looks at the growing appeal of Israel for international airlines.
Routesonline's latest analysis of the European aviation industry, examining the top routes, airlines, airports and aircraft that are leading the market.
Sitting at the crossroads of East and West, Kazakhstan's potential to become a central aviation hub is set to be boosted by infrastructure developments at the country's second-busiest airport
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.
Low-cost giant Ryanair is to debut in Ukraine with flights to Kiev from four European cities, while Central and Eastern European low-cost airline specialist Wizz Air is to further expand its activities in the country with growing summer 2017 operations from both Kiev and Lviv.
The new routes will connect the countries directly, boost bi-directional tourism and establish an important link for trade and business between Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In compliance with the public service obligation rules, all five markets will be served on a twice weekly basis with flights commencing the first week of April 2017.
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.
Located between Germany's two hub airports of Frankfurt and Munich means Airport Nurnberg may be the small fish in the pond, but it hopes Its Blue Ocean campaign will help deliver new capital city connectivity in the future.
As it celebrates ten years of operations in Romania, Wizz Air is offering the greatest connectivity between Romania and the rest of Europe and promoting economic development throughout the country with the introduction of new direct international services from an increasing number of regional points.
It seems there’s more than enough room in Budapest for Europe's rival low-cost carriers Ryanair and Wizz Air. Wizz Air CEO József Váradi and Ryanair CMO Kenny Jacobs share their plans to Routes News magazine.
Slovenian carrier Adria Airways will provide an important hub link into the Star Alliance network via Lufthansa’s Bavarian hub at Munich Airport, while Wizz Air will introduce a low-fare offering to London, introducing 27,000 seats to and from Olsztyn-Mazury in the current calendar year.
The new connection will be the only direct flight between London Gatwick and Bucharest and will grow Wizz Air’s daily flights between the two cities to four, complementing its existing three times daily link from London Luton, a route that was introduced almost ten years ago in January 2007.
As the Eastern European market continues to grow, much of the growth can be attributed to two of the biggest low-cost carriers (LCCs) in the region. Ryanair and Wizz Air dominate much of the market, but despite growing service, only overlap on a handful of routes. Both carriers have announced plenty of new services in the last 12 months, many of which serve Poland – the largest of the Eastern European air transport market with a third of all seats.
Wizz Air is already the leading airline in the Romanian market having overtaken the capacity offering of national carrier TAROM in 2014. It currently offers 114 routes from the country’s airports providing low-fare access between Romania and the 16 countries for both business and leisure travellers. It has 19 aircraft based in Romania, an investment it values at nearly €2 billion and accounts for almost a third of all seats available from Romania’s airports.
The aviation sector in Poland plays an important role in the country’s economy and its network connectivity is unrecognisable today to that when the country joined the European Union in 2004, around 15 years after the end of communist rule. Routesonline investigates how point-to-point connectivity has helped put the country’s developing regional cities on the network map.
Wizz Air will transfer its flights to Gdansk, Skopje and Kiev from next month and at the same time end its flights to Riga. It will continue to connect Hamburg to Gdansk with four flights a week and Skopje and Kiev with twice-weekly flights from April 17, 2016.
Ryanair has more than quadrupled its capacity offering from Central and Eastern Europe over the past ten years with an average annual rise of 38.9 per cent between 2006 and 2015, according to schedule data from OAG. This has been to combat the emergence of Wizz Air, which over the same period has established itself as the largest carrier in these emerging markets.
The new routes will commence from the start of the summer schedules in late March 2016 with the introduction of twice weekly flights to both John Lennon Airport in Liverpool and Keflavik International Airport, serving Reykjavik from March 27, 2016 and a weekly flight to Ibiza from June 18, 2016 to September 17, 2016.
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.
