They are looking to lure the several hundred thousand passengers using those routes and 85,000 companies in some of the largest local business centers.
Tarom is currently offering flights from Bucharest to Timisoara, Cluj-Napoca, Oradea, Satu Mare, Baia Mare, Suceava and Iasi and until last year was the only airline serving those routes. It carries about 400,000 passengers a year to Timisoara, Iasi and Cluj-Napoca alone, according to ZF estimates. The lack of highways to connect the major cities of the country and the state of Romania’s railroads makes airplanes a solution more and more Romanians choose.
The low-cost airlines rely on low prices to give them a competitive edge on domestic flights, as well on the short time it takes to get people to their destination compared with a railroad operator. For instance, a ticket for a Blue Air flight from Bucharest to Iasi, a route it started operating last fall costs about as much as the cheapest train ticket (full price). It takes six hours and forty-one minutes to reach Iasi by train and only one hour by plane.
Blue Air was the first to challenge Tarom’s domestic flights monopoly. It resumed domestic flights after a five-year hiatus. It once offered flights from Arad, Cluj-Napoca and Timisoara to Bucharest but stopped doing it because of low demand. Other companies attracted by the domestic flights market were Fly Romania and Carpatair.
The next company to start offering domestic flights is Ryanair, the largest low-cost airline in Europe, which announced it would introduce Timisoara-Bucharest flights in November. Tarom carried 160,000 people on this route last year, according to Transport Ministry data. It takes about nine hours to reach the city by train and about one hour by plane.
Timisoara is one of the most important industrial centers of the country and one of the cities that attracted a lot of investment from automotive component manufacturers such as Continental, Delphi Packard and TRW Automotive.
Hungary’s Wizz Air, too, announced it would introduce flights on the Bucharest-Cluj-Napoca route on July 22. Wizz Air first offered such flights a while ago but stopped at the end of 2008, less than one year after introducing them.
Wizz Air is the largest airline operating in Romania by passenger numbers, having carried 4.5 million people to and from local airports in 2015.
Tarom dropped several domestic routes in the past few years, such as Bucharest-Targu Mures and Bucharest-Sibiu. Its chief executive Christian Heinzmann said in an in interview in 2014 that profitability of domestic flights depends on destination and to be considered profitable the load factor on a route should be at least 70%.
Join Airlines has recently announced interest in operating the Arad-Bucharest route, reopening this domestic route, which Blue Air dropped a few years ago, according to the data centralized by ZF.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)