Over the last six years, the increase in the number of passengers in Romania stood at 85%, above the region’s average. Romania will generate one quarter of the total traffic of the low cost airline this year, that is 3 million passengers, Wizz Air’s chief commercial officer Gyorgy Abran said.
Wizz Air went from merely 17,000 passengers in 2006 to 2.7 million in Romania last year. The low cost airline’s main investor is private equity firm Indigo Partners.
The traffic figures put it on the top spot among airlines in Romania, ahead of state-owned Tarom and low cost operator Blue Air owned by Nelu Iordache. Wizz Air operates 39 Airbus A320 aircraft from 16 hubs over more than 250 routes in Central and Eastern Europe.
Wizz Air will introduce flights to Alghero (Spain), Oslo and Geneva from Bucharest next year. No other airline has had any direct flights to Norway’s capital so far.
The flights to Oslo are meant to create a direct connection to Scandinavia, which does not exit at the moment and will target businesspeople, Romanians working in those countries and tourists, Abran said.
The introduction of the new flights should boost the passenger numbers on the flights to and from Bucharest by 200,000 to 1.7 million, Wizz Air officials said.
Wizz Air will also introduce new flights from Cluj Napoca to Bari (Italy), Brussels (Belgium), and Eindhoven (Netherlands) and increase frequency of flights to Dortmund, Milan and Paris. It will also allocate a third aircraft for the Cluj-Napoca airport. New flights will also be offered from the Targu Mures Airport where the airline will introduce two new destinations, Bologna and Munich.
The business model that helped the company grow during the crisis was operating from secondary airports to keep costs at a minimum, offering attractive fares to customers and selling tickets online to cut personnel costs and via several travel agencies. Despite its low prices, the company can still boost revenue by charging for additional services (catering on board, seat reservation, luggage).
Wizz Air’s competition includes low-cost airline Blue Air and regular airlines Tarom, Air France-KLM, British Airways, and Lufthansa.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)