|
Battle takes off for Polish low-cost flight market
The battle for Poland's low-cost air travel market is taking to the skies, as competing carriers last week announced plans to expand their services in the European Union's biggest new member state.
Low-cost European airline WizzAir said it was planning to double the number of its flights to and from Poland from mid-September, in a bid to snap up 1.5 million passengers a year.
"On the 15 of September we will fly 87 frequencies, more than doubling our capacity. I think it is a real commitment of WizzAir towards the Polish market," WizzAir President Jozsef Varadi said in a statement.
"We will give the opportunity to fly cheap and convenient to more than 1.5 million travellers a year."
Central European carrier SkyEurope was hot on its heels, announcing a day later it was opening a second base, after Warsaw, in the southern city of Krakow, a key tourist destination
"Our presence in Warsaw and Krakow is the initial step of our expansion in Poland," SkyEurope Chairman Alain Skowronek said in a statement.
"We will further develop our business and continue to offer low-fare flights to Polish travellers."
Low-cost air travel was unavailable in Poland, a large central European country of 38.2 million people, until December last year, when Polish airline Air Polonia became the first carrier to offer flights in and out of the country for peanuts.
The number of low-cost flights is now mushrooming, after Poland became one of 10 countries to join the EU on May 1, in an expansion which created a 25-nation open market for air travel.
EU membership has also boosted the Polish tourism industry, with the Institute of Tourism reporting 30 percent more visitors from other EU countries in the first six months of this year compared with the same period of 2003.
The boom in low-cost services has left national carrier LOT rushing to compete, with shareholders agreeing last month to set up a low-cost company.
"A LOT daughter company will service low-price and charter flights," LOT spokesman Leszek Chorzewski told reporters last month.
"We want the company to begin operations as soon as possible."
WizzAir, which is based in London and set up at the airport of the southern industrial city of Katowice in mid-May, last week launched its first services from Warsaw and the northern city of Gdansk, to London's Luton airport.
It said new flights were also planned from September 15 to Copenhagen and Malmo in Sweden, from all three Polish airports.
Since launching its services in Poland in May, WizzAir has already carried around 100,000 passengers from Poland and Hungary to several European cities.
They include Brussels; London; Dortmund, Germany; Rome; Milan; Paris; Stockholm; Athens; and Copenhagen.
Of the 144 flights a week the airline is to operate, 88 are from Poland.
SkyEurope, whose shareholders include the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and ABN AMRO, announced it would start flying from Krakow to London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam and Milan on September 30.
SkyEurope, which also has centres in Bratislava and Kosice, eastern Slovakia, and Budapest, said it wants to transport a million passengers a year on its 12 aircraft, which link 36 destinations in 12 countries.
Air Polonia, which is owned by three Polish businessmen, had previously announced new connections between Polish airports at Warsaw and Gdansk, Szczecin and Bydgoszcz in the northwest, Wroclaw in the southwest, to London's Stansted airport along with a new Warsaw-Stockholm flight on October 31.
(Source: http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/040815031457.p1wvv2mp) |
|
