Hungarian Wizz Air to restart its service but with limited number of sold seats on each plane

The Hungarian low-cost airline said that they will not postpone the takeover of the new planes they ordered before the coronavirus epidemic even though experts say that the air passenger market will not start to grow again until 2022. The budget airline is thinking about selling only a limited number of seats to get permission to restart its services as soon as possible.

According to AIRportal.hu, the company announced the reduction of their crew by 1,000 and the lowering of the salaries for those remaining, last Tuesday. Furthermore, they said that they will take out of circulation the old planes of their fleet. In a phone interview, József Váradi, Wizz Air’s CEO, added that, based on their calculations, the market will start to grow again only from 2022.

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Despite all these, Wizz Air does not plan to postpone the takeover of the new Airbus A320neo planes it ordered before the epidemic broke out. AIRportal.hu says in this regard that, contrary to the plans, the company will receive fewer planes because the Airbus was not able to produce as many as they promised in the contract.

In July 2019, they planned to use  19 new planes, but that number was reduced to only nine by November.

Wizz Air would like to restart its services as soon as possible, so it is now thinking about not selling middle seat tickets to reduce the anxiety of the passengers since

they would be able to keep a greater distance. 

In practice, that would mean that passengers would be able to occupy only 2/3rd of the seats. Interestingly, the original idea was brought up by Alexandre de Juniac, leader of the International Air Transport Association. He added that they would start negotiations about that with the governments worldwide.

However, that will affect the profitability of the airliners since their flights produce a profit only if they are filled 75 pc at least with passengers. Furthermore, that so-called load factor is much higher (90 pc) in the case of the budget airlines like Wizz Air. For example, in 2019,

they reached 93 pc.

Source: airportal.hu