Spendthrift Shoestring

Wizz Air Rising

A very interesting article by Sean Carney and Leos Rousek in the Wall Street Journal yesterday argues that Wizz Air is very adeptly taking advantage of what has become a weak Central/Eastern European budget airline market. As SkyEurope stumbles—the airline successfully applied for bankruptcy protection last week—and the effort to privatize CSA Czech Airways is postponed, Wizz Air is moving forward in the region as a serious player.

Carney and Rousek point out that Wizz Air will fly to all but two of SkyEurope's destinations by the end of the summer, leaving the beleaguered SkyEurope little room to argue for a distinctive route map. Wizz Air is also developing Prague as an additional hub, which will bring it into further—and in some cases direct—challenge with Czech Airways.

Wizz Air is known among LCC followers as a bare bones operation. The perks are few and far between. If the budget airline comfort scale has Ryanair at 1 and Air Berlin at 5, Wizz Air is damn close to 1. But all this will cease to matter if Wizz Air effectively becomes the biggest player in Central and Eastern Europe and keeps its fares dirt cheap in the process. For the airline to capitalize on its growth, I have the following six recommendations:

1. Oppose the fee and surcharge madness afflicting budget airlines in Europe by branding and publicizing an outright refusal to tack such costs onto fares.

2. Expand routes from Bulgaria and Romania into Germany, Scandinavia, the UK, Germany, Spain, and Italy.

3. Develop routes between Turkey and Germany, Scandinavia, and the UK. Target these expansions to family and business travelers, not holiday travelers.

4. Develop routes to the former Yugoslavia and Albania. No budget airline has aggressively moved into the Western Balkans, and there is much room for maneuver here. Target migrant and holiday travel streams alike.

5. Give us something exciting. Baku? Tbilisi? Trabzon? Minsk? Budget European explorers want new corners of continent to explore. Become our new favorite airline.

6. Add a carbon offsetting option at check out.

Ukraine Gets More LCC Action

On Wednesday, Wizz Air announced a Kyiv-London Luton route from December on; today, the airline announced a slew of routes in and out of Ukraine: Kyiv-Cologne, Kyiv-Dortmund, Lviv-Dortmund, and Lviv-London Luton.

Back in December, I forecasted the discovery of Ukraine by LCCs in 2008. I'm just surprised that it's taken so long to happen, and that the development of routes has been restricted to a trickle. I guess there is the whole aviation-industry-in-trouble thing to contend with.

Now when will Ryanair and Wizz Air start flying into Chisinau? That's the question.

Ukraine Gets Cheap Flights

Back at the end of December, I predicted that 2008 would see further low-cost carrier expansion in Eastern Europe, with more routes into Romania and Bulgaria and the tentative development of routes into Ukraine and Moldova. I thought that we might see SkyEurope and even Ryanair beginning some routes to Kyiv by the end of the year.

But the first serious move comes from Hungarian Wizz Air, who will be launching seven Ukrainian domestic routes in July. Wizz Air's Ukraine hub will be Kyiv; they'll fly between the capital and L'viv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Simferopol, and Zaporizhia, and will also fly routes between Simferopol and both L'viv and Kharkiv. Details are here. The airline is not running any international routes in or out of Ukraine.