Thirteen more routes have been added to Wizz Air’s summer schedule, taking the total number of new services being launched by the Central and Eastern Europe ULCC close to the 150 mark.
This week: Hamburg has secured its first-ever non-stop service to Tirana; EgyptAir is to restore Ireland’s link with Egypt; and Alaska Airlines is making further changes to its Californian network.
Following news this summer of a further 2.2 billion Euros funding being made available for Berlin Brandenburg Airport’s new terminal’s construction, Germany’s airports are largely optimistic for the future. Here's the view of Hamburg Airport.
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.
The aircraft, which is configured with 86 seats and will be leased between the busy summer months of June and September 2016, will allow Air Serbia to expand its flight network with non-stop flights to Hamburg in Germany and Kiev in Ukraine being introduced from its Belgrade base. In addition, the aircraft will be deployed on the carrier’s existing Belgrade – Sofia route.
The growth will be supported through the arrival of an additional 98-seat aircraft, arriving in June, will be the 20th Embraer to join the British Airways fleet at London City. The extra routes mean that BA will have its busiest ever summer at London City Airport where it will operate over half the flights, despite speculation that it could cut its operations related to a change in ownership and charges at the Docklands facility.
Ryanair will launch flights from the city from November 1, 2016 with a twice daily link to the Spanish capital, Madrid, a daily service to Brussels Charleroi and London Stansted, a four times weekly link to Berlin and twice weekly flights to Fez, Malta and Warsaw Modlin.
Eurowings, as part of the ongoing fragmentation and restructuring of Lufthansa’s long-haul offering, will introduce widebody Airbus A330 aircraft on 12 October 2015 from Cologne and Hamburg to Palma Mallorca.
The addition of the routes from Liège will expand the VLM network to nine destinations in six countries and will continue a recent growth in passenger operations at Liège Bierset Airport, which is better known as a major European freight hub.
The airline, part of the Lufthansa Group, has been forced to cancel a number of its domestic and European short-haul routes as a result of the walkout by the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) union which has failed to reach an agreement on working contracts for its members with the Lufthansa Group.
Amsterdam is already one of easyJet’s most successful network points with more than 3.5 million passengers flying annually to and from 21 destinations. It revealed earlier this year its plans to open a base at Schiphol Airport to further strengthen the airline’s long term strategic position at the airport, where it now holds a nine per cent market share having first introduced flights back in 1996.
The five times weekly service to Berlin Tegel and daily services to Hamburg and Oslo will commence from Sunday 26th October through to Friday 27th March, cementing Flybe’s position as Birmingham Airport’s biggest carrier.
The two new routes stretch from the north of Scotland with a new daily Inverness – Dublin service, to the south of England with a daily Southampton – Hamburg link, both of which will launch from October 26, 2014 at the start of the winter schedules.
Flybe has confirmed it will launch new daily links from Birmingham to Hamburg and Oslo from October 26, 2014 through to March 27, 2015, while its new summer 2014 flights to Bordeaux, Cologne, Florence, Oporto, Reykjavik and Toulouse will be extended through the winter season.
