Wizz Air Is About to Fly Spaniards Around Their Own Country

Wizz Air will open its first two bases in Spain in early November, and the more interesting detail is not the bases themselves but what they let it do. Valencia opens on November 2 with seven new routes; Madrid follows on November 3 with four. Of those eleven, eight are domestic — Asturias, Bilbao, Palma de Mallorca, Santander and Santiago de Compostela from Valencia, and Asturias, Palma and Santiago from Madrid. The Hungarian ultra-low-cost carrier has flown to Spain for years. It has never flown within it.

Domestic Spain is not empty airspace. Iberia, Vueling, Air Europa and Ryanair all compete there, and the high-speed rail network has taken a large bite out of the routes where trains are genuinely competitive. What Wizz Air appears to have identified are the city pairs that rail serves badly: Valencia to Bilbao, Valencia to Santiago de Compostela, Madrid to Asturias. These are journeys where the AVE either does not run directly or takes long enough that a cheap flight wins on total time. It is gap-filling rather than a frontal assault.

The international additions are fewer in number but reveal the network logic. Valencia gains Naples and Brasov; Madrid gains Pisa. Brasov is a Wizz Air home-market airport in Romania, and Naples and Pisa are Italian leisure markets the airline already knows intimately. Wizz will also add frequencies from Madrid to London Luton, Milan Malpensa and Rome Fiumicino, thickening routes it already flies. Four Airbus A321-family aircraft will be stationed across the two bases initially, with the airline citing more than 150 direct jobs and several thousand indirect ones.

For travellers the practical effect arrives with the winter schedule. Spanish domestic fares have been under pressure from consolidation, and a fifth operator with a genuinely low cost base tends to move prices on the routes it touches. The risk is the usual one with Wizz Air bases: the airline has closed them quickly before when the numbers did not work, redeploying aircraft to stronger markets at short notice. Two aircraft per base is a small commitment, easily reversed and equally easily grown if Spaniards book in the volumes the airline expects.

Sources: Aviation Week, Business Travel News Europe