Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
Is demand for flying strong enough in Warsaw to be worth adding a few aircraft to Poland ?
Would UK airline employees criticise if Wizz dumped capacity on leisure routes from France or Germany ?
I don't know the Polish market that well... but it's clear that in the second half of last year, Wizz significantly overexpanded - perhaps sending aircraft to Ciudad Real or Teruel might have been a better choice
Yeah I just meant a route from Gatwick. Aside from being the most populous city in Poland, Warsaw is the gateway for anybody traveling as far West as Lodz (3rd most populous city, but close to zero connectivity), more or less the whole of the country to the East of Warsaw, including Bialystok (no airport) and as far South as Lublin. Plus everywhere in between. Put simply, almost half of Poland uses Warsaw as their main entry point.
Given the large Polish population south of the Thames and the hassle (and expense) of getting to Stansted or Luton, it's a gaping hole in Gatwick's route network. It's been operated by Norwegian and easyJet in the past, but WAW has very high fees and Polish flights generate very little auxiliary revenue, so even though load factors were good, there was always more money to be made elsewhere for them. But Wizz have three daily flights (pre-Covid) into Luton, even just moving one of those to Gatwick would capture a huge market.
But instead they'd rather dump cheap capacity into routes competing with easyJet in an attempt to capture market share and take passengers away from them. It's what they've been doing in Luton for the last five years or so, and it's what they're going to try to do in Gatwick now too. Their take over bid unmasked their intentions, but given that more or less everything Wizz has touched since they ventured out of their core East Europe market has been a catastrophic failure, one wonders how long the magic money tree will last.