News: Wizzair to start flights to Warsaw from Durham Tees Valley
Flights > News > # 1030 (23/10/2006)
Central European specialists Wizz Air will be starting new flights from Durham Tees Valley to the Polish capital Warsaw next year.
The Warsaw flights will run three times a week from July 28. Wizz Air are the third airline to launch flights from Durham since BmiBaby’s sudden announcement that they would be pulling out of the airport next month. Flyglobespan will be offering a weekly service from Durham to Tenerife this winter, as well as four new routes to Spain and Portugal next summer. Ryanair’s new flights to Barcelona Girona take off in February.
Wizz Air’s UK supremo, John Stephenson, said Durham is ideally placed to serve a large population area, adding: “We believe that the operational flexibility and the development potential of the airport will make it a perfect fit for Wizz Air. Our new passengers from Tees Valley will enjoy our low fares and excellent services as much as our Polish travellers, who are already familiar with Wizz Air as the largest low cost carrier in Central and Eastern Europe.”
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Comment:
Bosses at Durham Tees Valley will certainly be able to stick two fingers up BmiBaby management, now that they have been able to introduce new routes from no less than three different airlines since BmiBaby announced their departure from Tees Valley at the end of last month. Previous conversations with airport management had hinted that this route was in the pipeline long before the BmiBaby withdrawal, and Durham Tees Valley certainly fits in with the Wizz Air business model.
Wizz Air now have most corners of the UK covered, choosing the low-cost airport in each region - starting with Luton rather than Gatwick or Stansted, then moving on to Glasgow Prestwick rather than International; Liverpool and Doncaster Robin Hood ahead of Manchester; Coventry rather than Birmingham or East Midlands; Bournemouth rather than Southampton; and now Durham Tees Valley rather than Newcastle.
As with Wizzair's recent choice to market Coventry as Birmingham/Coventry, the airline is also marketing Durham as serving the Newcastle region, but the airline's choice to operate flights from its Warsaw base, rather than from Katowice, is much more interesting.
Wizzair initially chose Katowice as the start point for their other recent UK airport launches, so why did the Polish capital, where we understand there is significant pressure on slots, get preference this time? There might well be competition from both Newcastle and Leeds Bradford airports in the form of Jet2 offering cheap flights to Krakow, but similar competition also exists at both Birmingham (Sky Europe) and Nottingham East Midlands (Ryanair). Instead, it looks like regional route development funds might have had a role to play.
