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.
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Wizz faces a huge battle on the Warsaw and Budapest routes from Luton.

While wizzair claims and has a lower cost base, easy has a number of big aces to call on.

Firstly, it flies 20 routes (with multilple frequencies) from Luton compared to just four for Wizzair. This presents huge marketing economies.

easy has an experienced and talented team working on yield management. Working to fill planes and squeeze as much money out of each punter as possible.

This also works in their favour in a head to head battle. When both easy and GO were competing on NI to Scotland, easyJet had significantly better loads with similar schedules. When the companies merged, it emerged that Go's losses were much deeper on these routes during the period.

In addition, it can afford to have a half a dozen or more loss making routes out of 160 plus. Wizz cannot.

Wizz will be stronger from the European end than the London end but this is likely to be a lower yielding market.

The rest of above report says that Wizzair has up to now been running loads of around 50 per cent, increasing to 65 per cent in the summer months.

I can't see this airline going anywhere on these routes. They'd be better off serving Dublin and Manchester.

Air Poland Szczecin-London route

27Jul Air Poland will inaugurate nonstop service from Szczecin to London Stansted on November 2nd. The airline will operate 2 flights a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays using its Boeing 737s. Air Poland will also inaugurate a weekly flight from Bydgoszcz to London Stansted operated on Sundays.

Blimey imagine making a terminal tannoy announcement that the Air Polonia flight from Bydgoszcz had just arrived!
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On the negative side, I think Air Polonia have dropped Katowice, Poznan & Slupsk wef 30 Oct. Szczecin & Bydgoszcz look like being the substitutes.

From our friends at ABTN
 

WIZZ AIR, the new Budapest-based European airline seems to have quickly established itself as a serious player in the budget airline market. In just 11 weeks it has carried 100,000 passengers. The airline launched its operation on 19 May 2004 with flights from Katowice and on 24 June started flying from Budapest to 10 European destinations. By mid-September six 180-seat Airbus A320 will serve 21 routes. http://www.wizzair.com

Following 11 weeks of operations, no frills airline Wizz Air Rt has transported 100,000 passengers already. Its first flight from Katowice, Poland on May 19, flights from Budapest went into operation on June 24. July was a peak period for Wizz Air with 60 000 passengers using the company that month, 25 000 of them through Budapest. These figures place Wizz Air firmly amongst the top five airlines of both Poland and Hungary. (NG 5) Z.K.




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Yyyup
 

As I´ve said before, EZY and Ryanair will face some serious competition from companies like Wizzair who offer a better product and have lower operating costs.

Colegate care to comment? ;)

With the inaugural flight from Warsaw due to arrive at Luton at 07.30 local, plus the start of the daily Gdansk rotation, this will bring to 14, the number of daily flights to/from LTN from Hungary/Poland, operated by Wizzair. This will increase to 16 wef 15 sept, following the start of a third daily rotation from BUD.

With easy increasing flights to BUD from 1 to 2 daily plus launching 2 x daily flights to WAW, both from the end of Oct & Krakow from mid-december, the competition will increase considerably.

Just wait to see Easy and RYR paying westermn rates to the crew of these airlines... Both Sky Europe and Wizz will have a major problem!

Wizzair will launch 3 x weekly flights from Liverpool to Warsaw, Katowice & Budapest from 7 December. Great news for LPL!!!!!


Third daily LTN-BUD stated today. Wizz now have 8 daily departures ex LTN

Just thought I would throw this in here lads.

I flew on the wizz BUD to LTN route yesterday (Wednesday the 22nd of September) and I counted a total of 26 people on board.

They cannot continue with load factors like these, not to mind what they will have when they go X3 daily?

Agreed. I flew LTN-BUD last friday with Wizz and there were about 70 on board. Coming back Sunday, probably 100. Two weeks before that went out with EZY and I reckon their were only about 8/10 empty seats both ways.

Wizz are three daily now bar Tues/Thur/Sat & will be 3 x daily everyday from 26 Oct. Easy also going twice daily from end of October. Five flights a day, not for long methinks.

Not really unexpected but Wizz do appear to have begun tinkering with their schedules ex LTN. For the Winter timetable, they had listed a total of16 daily flights to/from LTN for their routes from BUD,GDN,KTW & WAW. Now, depending on which day of the week you pick, this seems to vary from a minimum of 10(Tues) up to a maximum of 16(fri) with all other days falling somewhere in between.

BUD and WAW seem to be the worse affected with both loosing the early morning arrival on a couple of days each week and in the case of BUD, also the midday departure on Tues/Thurs/Sat. This is probably a result of easy going twice daily LTN-BUD/WAW from 1 Nov. With easy also starting LTN-KRK on Wednesday, this will no doubt further impact on Wizz's KTW operation & expect to see a further reduction here also.

Are Wizz starting to feel the heat already from easy. Certainly seats with easy, seem to be selling very well on the KRK route if the prices are anything to go by, when compared to those offered by Wizz to KTW,(much cheaper) just down the road.

Wizz have just started releasing summer 05 flights from BUD. Flights to LTN seem to have settled down to twice daily except Tues/Wed when a 1 x daily(evening) operates. The third (mid-day) departure mentioned in their winter timetable but rarely flown, has been dropped. Assuming easy stay the same for the summer, this would give 4 x daily flights between LTN-BUD five days a week, 3 x daily two days a week. Probably just about right.

Other flights have not yet been released. New destinations will be released very soon.

Wizz have released all Summer 05 flights from Budapest with the exception of BGY & LPL. Does this mean they are being "pulled" at the end of the winter season?. In LPL's case, they have not even started yet. Of course, they might just be late in releasing the flights.

I e-mailed WZZ yesterday morning about this about this - still waiting for a reply. It still looks as though BUD is the only station that has had its S05 schedule released - still nothing showing for WAW.

"Company President Jozef Varadi the former President of Malev
has said that WizzAir was also planning to expand its capital to 40 million euros (49.1 million dollars) from seven million euros."

Seems like easyJet could have something of an East European battle on its hands...

:suspect: