Henri Coanda Airport saw 102 planes taking off and landing every day last year, while the Baneasa airport had 35 planes take off and 35 land. All the flights of the low-cost airlines Blue Air, Wizz Air and GermanWings will be moved to the Otopeni Airport as of March 25.
This move will benefit the coffee shops (City Cafe for instance expects 60% rise in revenue), bars and restaurants inside the airport and the hotels near it. On the other hand, Snack Attack or Intesa, which used to operate on the Baneasa Airport, will lose the business generated by the 2.4 million passengers transiting this airport a year, who will join the 5 million passing through Otopeni, according to last year’s traffic data.
“This move from the Baneasa Airport to Otopeni has taken a lot of hard work. The ground service and technical support were relocated, and the aircraft space on the Otopeni Airport was occupied,” says Gheorghe Racaru, strategy director with low-cost airline Blue Air and with the other companies in the group controlled by businessman Nelu Iordache.
Blue Air submitted the flight schedule to the Bucharest Airports National Company. It will keep the same takeoff and landing hours on most routes, and made changes to its schedule only in some cases to take advantage of the permission to fly 24 hours a day, which it could not do on Baneasa as that airport had night flight restrictions in place.
“The major companies will do everything in their power to ‘steal’ clients from low-cost airlines. Low-cost airline fare will go up with the move to Henri Coanda and the low-cost planes will have to wait for regular airline flights to take off and land. The major companies will probably maneuver in such a way as to cause the longest delays for low-cost airlines to steal customers, since fare differences will no longer be that high. Low-cost airlines will have to grow in the shadow of the major regular airlines as much as they could,” commented an air transport expert who would not reveal his name.
Unlike Baneasa, where low-cost planes were at home, on Otopeni they will always be “unwanted guests,” “kept waiting in line” by the major international airlines.
Once flights from Baneasa move to Henri Coanda, there will be no more low-cost flights, with fares going up so that they will be close to regular airline fares.
Wizz Air has doubled or even tripled air fares for plane tickets on international routes for trips after March 25, as shown by its website. Even though its officials said the change of airport would only drive airfare up 4%, on certain routes it is now equal to what national regular airline Tarom charges (which also provides on-board catering services).
The relocation to the flights to the Otopeni Airport also means resumption of train service connecting Bucharest’s main railway station (Gara de Nord) to Balotesti (close to the airport). The service had been discontinued because of the low demand and the bad weather this winter.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)