Wizz Air Links Bulgaria’s Capital with Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt and Bologna
BalkanTravellers.com
As of May 22, 2010, the airline will fly from Sofia to Madrid, Paris – Beauvais, Frankfurt – Hahn and Forlì/Bologna three times a week. The starting price for a one-way ticket on each of the routes is to be 33.99 leva (around 17 euro), which includes airport taxes and without additional costs for luggage and insurance.
On three of the new routes – Madrid, Paris and Frankfurt, the budget airline will enter into competition with Easy Jet, Air France and Lufthansa, respectively, as well as with Bulgaria Air which flies to all three destinations, the Dnevnik daily newspaper reported today. For the time being, no flights to Forlì near Bologna have been scheduled from Sofia.
Wizz Air also plans to increase the frequency of its existing flights to Endhoven and Valencia starting next May, to three and four times a week respectively.
Currently, in addition to those two destinations, Wizz Air connects Sofia to Barcelona, Brussels, Dortmund, London, Milan, Rome, Varna and Venice. According to Dnevnik, the company is also considering beginning to offer flights to Bratislava as an alternative to passengers to Vienna, since the low-budget airline Sky Europe went bankrupt last month. “For now, we cannot afford to fly to Vienna, since the airport taxes are too high and our colleagues from Flyniki will take over that flight,” John Stephenson, Executive Vice- President of Wizz Air, explained, quoted by Dnevnik.
In order to cover the increased traffic to and from Bulgaria, Wizz Air plans to base a third aircraft in the country. As a whole, the company now operates 26 aircrafts, which are expected to grow to 132 by 2017. The air carrier occupies 11 per cent of Bulgaria’s aviation market, which puts it in second position, following Bulgaria Air.
The company, which has transported about 650,000 passengers from Sofia last year, has seen a 30 per cent overall growth for 2008, a large part of which is due to the Bulgarian market, Stephenson added.
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