It was expected, almost expected, low-cost airlines are the big winners of the summer. They are the ones who have benefited the most from the rebound in air transport activity. While health restrictions in Asia, and mainly in China, are still hampering the restart of long-distance flights, medium-haul seems to be making the crisis a thing of the past.
Figures from the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) give the measure of the dazzling health of low cost. And more particularly of the two market leaders, the Hungarian Wizz Air and the Irish Ryanair. For the single week of August 5 to 11, they were the only two companies to do better, and even much better, than during the same period in 2019, the last year before the crisis linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Eurocontrol, Wizz Air thus operated 19% more flights than in 2019, while Ryanair’s activity increased by 15%.
For Guillaume Hue, partner of the consulting firm Archery Strategy Consulting, “four factors explain their good performance”.
They first took advantage of “the strong resistance of their operating model, which has been less impacted by the Covid-19 crisis”. Conversely, regular companies are still far from their pre-pandemic activity. From August 5 to 11, the Air France group is 8% behind 2019. However, it is less bad than Lufthansa (– 20%) and especially than British Airways, whose number of flights operated is still 28% lower than the same week of 2019.
New lines
Second favorable element: with an activity concentrated solely on medium-haul, low-cost airlines “were able to afford to restore capacity as soon as demand returned”constate M. Hue.
Ryanair and Wizz Air are the two best examples. While the Air France group only operated 1,067 flights during the week of August 5 to 11, the Irish company, champion in all categories, rose to 3,012 flights. Wizz Air is far behind, with only 817 flights; but the Hungarian company, a sort of clone of Ryanair in Central Europe, is almost a new arrival in the European sky.
In addition to the faster restart of medium-haul, low-cost airlines also benefited from a much better pre-Covid financial health than that of regular airlines, and this is their third asset. From the end of 2020, while Air France-KLM, Lufthansa and other British Airways were still pulling the devil by the tail, Wizz Air, without even waiting for the end of the pandemic, multiplied “announcements of new line openings”, says Mr. Hue. She’s not the only one. Its rival Vueling, a low-cost subsidiary of IAG, parent company of British Airways, has tripled the number of its destinations from Paris-Orly airport.
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