July 20, 2004
Central European budget airline Wizz Air aims to match easyJet's quality and win on pricing when its larger rival expands eastward later this year, Wizz Chief Executive Jozsef Varadi said on Tuesday.
EasyJet said earlier this month it would start flying from London to Warsaw and the southern Polish city of Krakow in October, and expand its service to Budapest. Elsewhere in the region it already flies to Ljubljana and Prague.
"We have two strategies for competing with easyJet: the first is to offer a product that's no worse than theirs, and the second is that we will always offer lower prices," Varadi told a news conference. "We have a lower cost structure, which allows this. EasyJet's costs are about twice as high as ours," he added.
Budget airlines have mushroomed in central Europe with the accession of eight of the region's former communist states to the European Union in May, which prompted them to scrap treaties protecting national carriers.
Wizz is widely regarded as one of the better-funded local start-ups, but analysts question whether its four planes can compete with established players like easyJet, whose fleet numbered 84 planes as of April.
Varadi also said that privately held Wizz now expects to break even next year, abandoning an earlier forecast that by the end of 2004 Wizz might achieve the load factor needed to move out of the red.
