Wizz Air suspends more EX-YU routes

Low cost carrier Wizz Air has temporarily suspended 28 routes from cities in the former Yugoslavia, with a further three to join in the coming two weeks, bringing the total to 31. The carrier has also reduced frequencies on a number of services as travel bans and entry restrictions continue to have an impact on air mobility in the region.

The budget carrier has temporarily suspended the largest number of routes from its biggest base in the region in Skopje, with thirteen services affected at the moment. They will be joined by flights to Turku on September 5 and Vaxjo on September 7. Services to Turku are being suspended on orders by the Finnish government which is introducing a ban on the route due to a number of coronavirus cases linked to the flights. The Finnish government said it can restrict operations based on EU legislation which foresees such measures “in the event of short-term problems due to unforeseeable and unavoidable circumstances”. Wizz Air hopes to resume the service on September 28 if circumstances permit. The low cost airline plans to restore operations to Salzburg, Larnaca, Bremen, Hanover, Baden Baden, Milan, Rome, Venice, Malta and Bratislava during the last few days of September, while operations to Budapest, Barcelona and Vaxjo are expected to restart during the first week of October. Currently, sixteen routes remain mostly unaffected although frequencies have been reduced for some, such as Sandefjord which will run once per week. From Ohrid, operations to Milan are suspended until September 30, while the remainder of the network, consisting of six routes, continues to operate, although services to Vienna and Basel have been reduced to one per week through to October.

Wizz Air’s Tuzla base currently has three routes suspended with a fourth to join next week. Operations to Friedrichshafen will be discontinued from September 4 until October 26. Flights to Salzburg, Vienna and Billund are expected to resume on October 25 and October 27. Twelve other routes continue to operate out of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s third largest city, although operations to Vaxjo have been reduced to one per week until the start of the 2020/2021 winter season in late October. Services between Budapest and Sarajevo are suspended until October 2.

From Belgrade, a total of five routes have been temporarily suspended. Operations to Malta are expected to resume on September 16, Baden Baden on September 29, Larnaca and Hanover on October 8, while services to Salzburg are planned from October 26. A total of nine routes continue to run, while a further nine new routes are planned to launch in March 2021. All five routes continue to operate out of Niš, although flights to Vienna have been reduced to one per week until the start of October.

The low cost airline is currently maintaining five routes to Pristina, although operations to Vienna have been reduced to one per week until October. The carrier still plans to introduce a new service from Milan to Kosovo next week, while operations to Budapest are suspended until October 2. From Podgorica, Wizz Air has suspended four routes, with Budapest to resume on October 4, Milan on October 24, while seasonal services to Warsaw and Katowice in Poland will not return until June 2021. The carrier continues to maintain operations from the Montenegrin capital to Dortmund, Memingen and Vienna, although flights to the latter have been reduced to one per week until October.

Wizz Air is also ending its seasonal flights from Luton to Split earlier than planned, by mid-September, and is redeploying capacity to Portugal instead. The new year-round service from Dortmund continues to operate normally, while seasonal flights from Katowice and Warsaw will end in mid-September. The low cost airline’s operations between Charleroi and Ljubljana continue to run without any changes.