Indigo Partners the largest shareholder in Wizz Air have sold approx half of their stake for £400m.

Some days ago the Wizz COO sold 10,000 shares.

Next A321NEO for Wizzair UK delivered to Luton today.

Wizz, we need you back at BOH!

Warsaw, Prague, Budapest an Bucharest are key routes we need

Wizz have just announced BHX-LCA twice weekly 321 from Mid May :-)

Re Post #42 17.3.21
"Next A321NEO for Wizzair UK delivered to Luton today"

Indeed one Airbus in & one out with a WUK 320 due to ferry from STN to CWL later today for interim storage.

Possibly another Airbus leaving the WUK fleet as a 320 as previously is due to fly from STN to CWL later today.

none are leaving the fleet, they're just in for storage.

Further expansion in Italy announced:

FCO will be a new base with 4 a/c and 32 new destination (e.g. LTN, LPL) starting July.

BRI & CTA will also be expanded from July with additional a/c. W6 has also slots from Linate which are used for domestic routes to BRI & BDS .

Meanwhile the base at AUH has 23 destination, some of them like Muscat, Salalah, Sohag, Nur-Sultan are unique in Wizz network.

Banja Luka will join the network as 3rd Bosnian (others are Tuzla and Sarajevo) destination.

After Trondheim base was closed only a few weeks of operation, Oslo is also no longer a base. Incoming flights from other bases are still operated.

Naples will be a new base with 2 A321 eff 30th July.

Jersey
 

Seems the planned JER routes from CWL & DSA have been canned before they’ve begun…

The no-quarantine amber rules probably sent this route swiftly to the graveyard.

That's ironic and disappointing as CWL social media were advertising it yesterday!

Alot of the DSA routes have been pushed back further to September which is strange seeing as travel is opening up. I guess the demand is limited.

@TimmiW
Some of the Wizz UK aircraft/crew are moved to other CEE bases for the summer because of crew shortage.

More likely to be a reflection of bookings to Jersey from pretty much everywhere being an absolute disaster, I suspect. What you do / don't need to do for Covid-19 and the frequent changes in Jersey's policy on this seem to have led to a pretty serious setback for the tourism industry.

TBSC

Sofia and Warsaw until the end of July.

Malta decided that only vaccinated people will be accepted to enter. Slovenia announced today that it will follow suit and I guess other countries will do the same. Not very promising for aviation.

Allowing only vaccinated people to travel is the way to go. Aviation, and many other industries, can't afford another hit.

That's the way for sure but if that happens this summer, it will be another hit.

I'm not so sure about that. 72% of adults in Wales, 66% of adults in England and 65% of adults in Scotland are already fully vaccinated on the latest numbers. That's a significant number which is obviously moving quickly upwards each week.

The real question is what to do with kids which would/ will have a big impact on travel during the summer holidays. Malta have said all those 12+ need to be fully vaccinated, but the UK only does 18+ as standard or 16+ for those who are vulnerable meaning there's an effective ban on almost all 12-17 year olds traveling there.

The thing is though, whether it hits travel or not, it's probably the most viable path to wider travel across Europe and beyond.

The UK is only a fraction of the market. Eg. in Hungary 52% of the whole population (not the adults) is vaccinated. The problem is with the "number obviously moving quickly upwards" part because it's not. Very few people are asking for it in the last 3-4 weeks, the government started to donate/lend the surplus stock to other countries. It means that half of the population might be banned from flying soon (and it's a lot worse than that in other countries). That's not a good outlook for aviation IMHO.

PCR testing, form filling and the uncertainty your destination might change traffic lights is putting quite a number off.

Economic woes or what?
 

This was a useful route that was recently introduced, now cancelled
https://www.gbc.gi/news/wizzair-canc...r-month-august

I just don't see how it is sustainable for them to announce routes and drop them a few weeks later.
I notice their Gatwick based routes now won't operate til September.

Constant chopping and changing. It isn't exactly good for the customer.

Wizz possibly opened Gibraltar, thinking that people could claim the green list benefits of Gibraltar, but use it as a back door to Spain, and thus avoid quarantine. All done on a nudge and a wink. Yes, naughty for people to be planning to do this, but this kind of thing happens.Yes, potential for being caught with a border stamp, but people probably thought Border Force haven't got the desire to check every page of every passport. I imagine some people might have booked, printed off proof of booking, and then immediately cancelled 7 nights in a Gibraltar hotel, just to wave some paperwork at people

Now that Spain doesn't incur quarantine - and probably won't for the duration of August - people who want to visit the Mediterranean will mainly book flights to Malaga / Alicante. Many of those who booked flights with Wizz between the UK and Gibraltar in August are probably happy that they can get their money back and book to where they actually wanted to go in the first place

Wizz are just reflecting booking habits by the (fraudulent) Great British public

Thats quite a big allegation. The reality is GIB is a small market (6 hotels) and flights have increased substantially. There just isn’t the demand to fill all these services and have somewhere to stay.

If GIB was being used as a backdoor to Spain it would end up Amber listed like other places which have been used as backdoors to other destinations. No positive tests from any green list passengers were received so even if they were all going to Spain they caused no risk to anyone else.

davidjohnson6

I presume you don`t have a shred of hard evidence to back this up?

I know I keep going on abou it but please can you get your FACTS right please. Wizz have not cançelled the Luton-Gibraltar service the route is suspended for August only returning in September. The Gibralter route is quite unusual with a mix of different types of passengers. The BA Heathrow service is often crammed with ships crews (mainly Asian) using the service to interline at Heathrow as they would need a visa via Spain.
Myself and my partner mainly used Gib because we lived a lot closer than Malaga and often cheaper plus more agreeable flight timings but has been said it has a very limited catchment area. I strongly object to it been used as a back door to Spain, a friend has just been to the UK and back and he said the paperwork, apps etc was ridiculous and Gib is a green destination!

Wizz have axed the new JER services after initially pusing back the start date to late July.

https://www.itv.com/news/channel/202...-and-doncaster

To be sustainable Wizz air and Ryanair simply have to fill their aeroplanes at the best yield they can so routes do chop and change a lot. In a pandemic the need to do that is even greater.

Easy Jet do not mange to achieve the low cost base of either and therefore look towards customer retention to a larger extent, they thus change things more gradually.

I would hope customers know this is likely now and accept that to get cheaper travel there are some strings attached.

Hmm, maybe. Wizz also tried (and have now given up on) Jersey. Seems to me to be a genuine attempt to take people to the very few places they could go at the time of planning. Unfortunately, as BA318 mentioned there really isn't enough accommodation in GIB to soak up the demand, and the testing/paperwork requirements for both GIB and JER have since changed with short notice, putting many off. On top of that, GIB and JER are both already being served by increased services from BA and/or Easyjet, both of whom are longer-established in the specific market. Now that the amber list restrictions have eased, it's hardly surprising that Wizz has cut its losses to look elsewhere.

Even amber-list resorts are now £££ as people book the few places available so personally, I'd be delighted if Wizz continued to open up new and underserved destinations, especially in Balkans, Black Sea and Georgia ... but anyone running an airline is going to stick with safe bets for the forseeable: Canaries, Costa del Sol, Greece.

VCE becomes 7th Italian base with 2 based A321neo starting March 2022
https://wizzair.com/en-gb/informatio...-16-new-routes

Wizz Air CEO calls carbon offsetting ‘a bit of a joke’ yet offers it to customers | Euronews

A funny thing to say that Wizz doesn't have any flights under 500 km (no short domestic flights) while it takes 5 mins to find a dozen such flights on their route map, the shortest one being only 250km (and domestic).

7 additional aircraft to be based in Ukraine: Kyiv (+5 to 8 a/c and 12 new destination) and Lviv (+2 to 3)

ODS-LTN to be launched as a new UK route.

VIE will get a 6th aircraft.

The Telegraph is reporting this morning that Wizz has ordered 102 additional A321 aircraft with a further 94 on option. The firm orders will be delivered between 2025 and 2027, the options before 2030.
The article says that Wizz plan to expand the existing fleet of 144 to 170 by next September, with an ultimate objective of a 500 aircraft fleet.

Significant are the 27 A321XLRs added to the existing 20 XLRs on order so definitely looking at new markets, Wizzair India next?

WZZ (or their ultimate owners) are really going for it aren’t they. I know a lot of these will be replacements but at some point there will become saturation unless they diversify into other markets (India, as has been suggested above).

I slightly fear for the likes of EZY post pandemic up against this power and aggression from the East, who tried to buy them out recently. EZY being by far the best (in my opinion) LCC in Europe. For the employees involved, the race to the bottom will continue even more so.

More widespread cuts to the UK winter programme. Alot of routes now cancelled or severely reduced until next April.

Only a couple of weeks after the media fanfare of how they are bucking the trend with winter and summer 2022 bookings.

I do wonder how serious they are to the UK market outside of Luton.

The need to quarantine until your test result comes back destroys the weekend citybreak market again. Lots of these PCR test companies were taking a week to get the results back to people last time.

The counter argument, is that firms taking 5 or more days to return PCR results will see a significant loss of business, while the firms that have in-person testing in an airport terminal and can give a result in approx 24 or 36 hours will take market share

TimmyW - do you happen to have some details as to what UK routes Wizz has either cut or reduced over the winter ? It would be great to have an objective measure of how Wizz's winter schedule compares to their published intention 2 weeks ago - what may be deep cuts to one person, may be trivial to somebody else

Doncaster to Riga is one example - a few flights in December and one or two in January, then nothing til early April.

Several from Liverpool.

Same with Gatwick.

Check their timetables.

These frequencies were reduced two days ago, so was before the latest travel restrictions.

It's pretty obvious what Wizz are doing, opening bases everywhere, launching new routes to great media fanfare (look at the Doncaster press release a few weeks ago) to try and get more bookings to improve their cash flow. Then cancel the flights and issue credits, in the hope customers will book one of the few flights they do operate.

EDIT - it seems as it isn't just the UK where they employ this model, read the comments section on this link https://www.exyuaviation.com/2021/11...anned-new.html