Low cost carrier Wizz Air has temporarily suspended a number of its flights from cities in the former Yugoslavia due to low demand, as well as evolving travel restrictions and measures to stem the flow of the coronavirus outbreak across the continent.
From its base in Skopje, services to Malta have been suspended until August 4, to Milan until August 5, to Salzburg and Hanover until August 17, to Larnaca and Bremen until August 19 and to Bratislava and Barcelona until August 20. Operations to Budapest will be halted at the end of this week until August 19. Some flights from Ohrid have also been impacted with Malmo cancelled until August 3 and Milan until August 19. From Belgrade, the airline has temporarily suspended operation to Larnaca until August 2, as well as to Salzburg and Malta until August 3. As previously reported, the carrier has delayed its Belgrade expansion until mid-August.
From Tuzla, the budget carrier has been forced to temporarily cancel its flights to Vienna until September 15 and Salzburg until September 17. The Sarajevo - Budapest route will be halted at the end of the week and is currently expected to resume on August 17. The suspensions come despite Bosnia and Herzegovina reopening its borders for citizens from the European Union, albeit with a negative coronavirus test. Meanwhile, the only route that has currently been affected out of Pristina is Budapest, which will be suspended until August 17. The carrier’s new route to Milan is still scheduled to launch this Saturday. Operations from Podgorica have also been affected, with services to Budapest to be suspended at the end of the week and resume on August 19.
Flights from Pristina, Ohrid, Niš and Podgorica to Vienna are all expected to be cancelled until at least early August, following Austria’s ban on air traffic from a number of countries. At this point, the carrier is still selling tickets on the aforementioned routes. Wizz Air services to Ljubljana and Split remain unaffected. Changes to the schedule, as well as the resumption dates for the abovementioned routes, are likely to change.
It's interesting that the ones from Tuzla are suspended until September...
ReplyDeleteYes. It is easy to be nonchalant like that when you have a monopoly. You dont have to worry about anything, there is nobody to compete with and noone will take advantage of your laid-back behavior and mistakes.
Delete^ That's true, they have no competition there.
DeleteWhat do you suggest they do? Fly empty aircraft around?
DeleteThat's what they are mostly doing in other places.
Delete"From Tuzla, the budget carrier has been forced to temporarily cancel its flights to Vienna until September 15 and Salzburg until September 17."
DeleteWRONG!
The ban is currently in force only until 31 July!
The flights from Tuzla are cancelled until the middle of September regardless of the ban. Why don't you check things before accusing others of being wrong when you are in fact wrong.
DeleteDid you even read my text? It is wrong that W6 was forced. It is their own free will decision!! Everything else is a lie.
DeleteA couple of days ago there was 1, yes 1 passenger from Budapest to Sarajevo. Flight still operated though
ReplyDeleteNot surprising, most of their flights from Budapest are almost empty.
Deletethat must be a special situation to be alone in the aircraft :D
DeleteIm not sure about other flights out of Budapest, but the Budapest - Sarajevo flights were almost always full.
DeleteIt's not really a surprise since I think Bosnian nationals were not allowed into Hungary and Bosnia did not allow EU nationals until today.
DeleteBudapest flights seem to be the weakest from their overall network and were already subsidized by the Hungarian government.
Delete^ Not quite. The Budapest route has performed surprisingly well and surprised everyone's expectations considering most routes got the A321 and even more frequencies. It is true that they are subsidised (and still are).
DeleteSo will Ryanair operate INI-BTS?
ReplyDeleteNo, that route isn't resuming until winter
Deletehttps://www.exyuaviation.com/2020/07/ryanair-to-restore-just-two-routes-to.html
Well I guess now we can see which routes depend mostly purely on gasto traffic, since these are all being kept.
ReplyDeleteNo surprise
ReplyDeleteSeems the Skopje base is most affected.
ReplyDelete@anon 09:08. Yes, North Macedonia is probably the worst affected in aviation and covid.
DeleteSKP base has the most routes so it's logical most flights will be affected.
DeleteA lot of countries have banned travelers from Mac. or demand 14 day quarantine. That is a sure way to make any demand for travel vanish.
Deletewhat do you expect when you are not allowed to travel
ReplyDeleteIt will get even worse as the situation is worsening every day in the Balkans
ReplyDelete@cancel wizz. Wizz is one of the most ecological airlines and has some of the newest fleets in the world.
DeleteWizz expected crisis to be fairly short. Some analysts are now saying travel volume will not return to 2019 levels in 3 to 5 years. That's beyond Wizz capabilities to flood the market for a year or two. Any news that erodes Wizz is a good news.
ReplyDelete"Any news that erodes Wizz is a good news."
DeleteWow what a tool. Be happy that you have them otherwise traffic at your airport would be at a much lower level, prices would be much higher and some 100 people wouldn't have a job.
Not everyone has to like Wizz. Flying one person or just a few as Wizz does is ecological disaster. Cancelling Wizz would be a positive thing for the environment.
DeleteJust ignore the troll.
DeleteHe can't comprehend that LCCs are here to stay because passengers want them.
He wants us to go back to the 70's when only state owned carriers were allowed to exist and only few people could afford air travel.
@9.19 you don't have to like them but hoping someone goes bankrupt is the lowest of the low.
Delete@Cancel Wizz
DeleteWhat would be ecologically correct would be a complete ban on old, polluting aircraft.
Like JU's 737s and ATRs for example. Airlines who do not fly aircraft with low emissions like the NEOS, the CS 100/300, Embraer 2 etc. should stop flying until they get modern fleets.
"Cancelling Wizz would be a positive thing for the environment."
DeleteLCCs in normal times operate with extremely high LF on P2P routes with very new fleet of aircraft. Doesn't get quite more environmental friendly than that, if you want to travel by air.
Anon 09.21 why? Why should we feel bad about a shameless predator such as Wizz Air? Did they care about poor people who lost their jobs because of their dumping practices? Did they care about people when they fired them with the first sign of corona?
DeleteWhat this guy really hates is that the passengers have a choice what airline to fly.
DeleteHe wants us to have only his favorite government carrier, whichever it is so that its lazy workers could continue being underworked and overpaid with no pressure whatsoever to become more productive.
@09:26
DeleteYou have it backwards! LCCs are creating a large amount of jobs by greatly increasing tourism and travel to a country.
That is what helps poor people, not a state owned carrier with metal cutlery, expensive tickets and permanent loses that the poor are forced to cover.
AND with LCCs the poor are able to travel by plane for a change instead of a bus.
Modern high bypass engines such as Pratt's purepower and CFM's Leap-X produce only a small fraction of CO2 emissions compared with the engines from the 70s and 80s that most home airlines in our region have on their fleets.
DeletePetar
Delete+1000
"Cancelling Wizz would be a positive thing for the environment." If you cancel Wizz, that does not mean that people who are flying with them will just stop traveling and you will make less CO2 emisions. They will travel to destionations not with Wizz but with cars, buses or other airlines. Example, from INI to VIE people will than use 4 buses for 1 A320, so i dont think that you will do anything positive for evoriment. If i can ask, if you want to cancel Wizz, does that means that you also want to cancel LH Group, Aeroflot Group, Turkish Airlines, IAG and AF-KLM Group, airlines who are actually larger than Wizz?
DeleteIt is unimaginable that 10 years from now Wizzair will not exist but greater surprises have happened in the past. Passengers were flying Concorde in the ‘80s and no one could have imagined supersonic commercial aviation would no longer exist in the 21st century, with passengers forced to fly on much slower and uglier planes than Concorde. VW employed thousands to develop and build diesel engines like V10 TDI about 15 years ago. Who would have thought German cities would introduce regulations to ban diesels from streets and VW would build electric cars now? US customers that were buying Hummers as a status symbol are now buying Teslas as a status symbol.
DeleteWhat today looks like modern and profitable airline will one day not too far in the future be considered wasteful and unnecessary air travel promoter and polluter. As hard as it is to comprehend now, there will be no Wizz Air 10 years from now. Wizz Rail perhaps, but not Wizz Air.
Wizz Rail - hahahaha
DeleteThe guy is just stupid.
DeleteSimply ignore him.
Responding with insults instead of arguments show inability of Wizz and their supporters to deal with unavoidable changes.
DeleteIf you want to have a railway company, you dont need just trains and route network. You need to have a your own railway tracks around the coutry so i dont think that you can just make a railway company as you can an airline. Wizz operates some really long routes, so i dont see any posibility that for 10 years you will travel with train from Split to Warsaw or from Niš to Memingen because goverments are responsibile for railway tracks. Still trains are a lot slower than planes so on longer routes they dont have any sense especialy in non developed coutries where you need to invest billions for railway network.
Delete@Cancel Wizz: I understand your point, it is valid, but in a general sense. How is this limited only to Wizz, but not to any other airline, regular or LCC?
DeleteRapid expansion of number of destinations and fleet even with latest engines results in a growth of total airline emissions at a Wizz-like LCC airlines, not just Wizz. Within ExYU region Wizz as an airline is leading that growth of CO2 emissions. This has been explained in previous comments posted when Wizz was a news topic.
DeleteWizz Air' s LF in Belgrade base fell below 45% in the first half of July.
Delete>Wow what a tool. Be happy that you have them otherwise traffic at your airport would be at a much lower level, prices would be much higher and some 100 people wouldn't have a job.
DeletePeople that used to build Hummers lost their jobs too. They are hopefully working for Tesla now. Move on with the times.
>Just ignore the troll. He can't comprehend that LCCs are here to stay because passengers want them. He wants us to go back to the 70's when only state owned carriers were allowed to exist and only few people could afford air travel.
Wrong. Passengers also want Concorde but can't comprehend times have changed. Customers want V10TDI but can't have it. If Earth can't sustain level of polution regulations will have to change. London has strict regulations that started with congestion charge, added toxicity charge and is now expanding Ultra Low Emission Zone. You can't let drivers do as they please. Copenhagen has been shutting down cars and expanding pedestian zones for decades:
https://i.redd.it/fzhhfygekmj11.jpg
Regulation will be the key to achieve the same level of impact in aviation.
So future is in trains in your oppinion? Why you do not imagine Wizz with electric airplanes in the future? Not just canceling Wizz because you dont love it.
DeleteThe Austria flight travel ban is a bit silly. Because Austria has not actually banned people from these countries to enter Austria. They can enter Austria through the land border with a negative PCR test or go into two week isolation.
ReplyDeletemore silly they allow flights to the US ..
Deletebtw Austrian Airlines are fuming on this decision of their gov their feed network just dissapeared
This too will pass.
ReplyDeleteIt will take years to pass...
DeleteThey will resume sooner or later.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see if JU will keep Larnaca.
ReplyDelete* I mean considering Wizz will temporarily suspend it.
DeleteThe upside for JU is that it carries transfer passengers.
DeleteAre travelers from Serbia banned from entering Cyprus or they "just" have to go into a two week quarantine?
Delete2 week quarantine. Very few countries are imposing complete bans. Most are just enforcing the same rules as before - quarantine.
DeleteWhy would anyone go for a Summer vacation in a country that demands a 14 day quarantine?
DeleteI am not saying that Cyprus or any other country are wrong in determining the best way to protect themselves from Corona but that pretty much kills tourism for this year.
Just my2cents.
It's not only this region that is being affected. FR just cut 1000 flights between Ireland and the UK alone.
ReplyDeleteOuch
Deletebecause Ireland requires everyone to quarantine gmfor two weeks.
DeletePity, just as aviation and airports were slowly starting to recover.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that they are still selling flights to Vienna from INI, PRN and TGD. They only cancelled TZL and OHD.
ReplyDeleteINI doesn't have flights to Vienna in the last week of July because of some work at Nis Airport and inability to have so many planes in Nis at the same time. These were precancelled. At least it's good it fell within the ban timeframe.
Delete@10.28 no you might check again they are still selling tickets to OHD.
DeleteThere will be no flights from VIE to ExYu regardless
"There will be no flights from VIE to ExYu regardless"
DeleteWRONG!
In exyu, Croatia and Slovenia are not banned till 31 July! So VIE to ZAG, ZAD, SPU, DBV, BWK (charters) are completely unaffected.
@7.24 SMFH this is about Wizz
DeleteAnd they made cuts on routes to nonEU countries, but not EU ones.
ReplyDeleteAlso Austria close air traffic for nonEU countries but not for EU ones.
Austria has closed it air traffic to several EU countries - Portugal, Sweden and UK (UK is still considered part of the EU in terms of air transport until the end of the year).
DeleteNot just those but also to Romania and Bulgaria which are EU members last time I checked.
DeleteDoes it makes sense for airlines to fly at ll at the moment? its not like there is a huge profit to make these days
ReplyDeleteI think you are right. It probably costs more to operate a flight with low pax capacity than having the aircraft parked.
DeleteIt is a very, very bad situation for the airline sector.
Wow guys this is just bad. I'm sure most of these routes won't be back at least not before summer 21 or maybe even 22
ReplyDeletethey will all be back within a few weeks.
DeleteNot if there are 15-20 pax per flight.
DeleteQuarantines will kill the aviation sector in these months. Ireland for example requires all arrivals (EU or any other country, including their own citizens) to quarantine.
ReplyDelete+1000
DeleteAgenda in full speed
ReplyDeleteDo you guys know why Wizz stopped flying from London Luton to Tuzla?
ReplyDeleteIf t was cancelled due to heaven losses on the route.
DeleteThursday they cancelled all TZL-BLL flights after 1/8 and after selling them until the day.
ReplyDeleteInitially it was still possible to buy the post 1/8 tickets but not rebook to any of those dates.
Later this changed but sure they turned some money on all this and various promotions lately.
The route was few days ago reduced to 2 flights per week.
It's probably RIP for BLL-TZL if not entire TZL for some time...