The chief executive of Wizz Air Holdings, József Varádi, has told Polish media that if he were the CEO of LOT Polish Airlines (LO, Warsaw Chopin), he would outsource short-haul feeder services to Wizz Air (W6, Budapest) and focus on long-haul operations only.

"This would be hard to execute but I believe that the resulting synergy would be beneficial to both parties. No full-service carrier in the world makes money on short-haul flights, and we know how to do it," Varádi said, stressing that it was his "private opinion".

The ch-aviation capacities module shows that Poland is one of the key markets for the London-listed, Hungary-based LCC, accounting for 9.7% of the total weekly scheduled capacity (including the group's non-EU offshoots Wizz Air UK and Wizz Air Abu Dhabi). Only Italy and the UK are larger markets for the group. Wizz Air has a 21.7% market share by scheduled capacity out of Poland, trailing behind Ryanair and LOT. It maintains five bases in the country: Warsaw Chopin, Kraków John Paul II International, Katowice Pyrzowice, Gdansk, and Wroclaw. At Warsaw Chopin, LOT's main connecting hub, Wizz Air has a 22.0% market share by capacity.

The OAG Traffic Analyser data shows that Wizz Air's main routes from Poland are to London Luton, from Warsaw Chopin, Gdansk, and Katowice, carrying over 209,000, over 130,000, and over 122,000 passengers each way in 2023. The airline carried nearly 10.2 million passengers to and from Poland last year. In turn, LOT carried 9.9 million passengers to and from its home country, the busiest routes being from Warsaw to Wroclaw, Szczecin Goleniów, and London Heathrow (over 80,000 passengers each way for each of them).

While LOT maintains its own extensive feeder network with a fleet of five E170s, fifteen E175s, eight E190s, and fifteen E195s, as well as six B737-800s and eleven B737-8s (with plans to add at least another eleven B737-8s by 2025), the idea of cooperating with Wizz Air is not new. In 2015, under then-CEO Sebastian Mikosz, LOT was in talks with Indigo Partners about a sale of a minority stake in the fully state-owned Polish flag carrier, which would also open the doors to a potential feeder agreement. The deal was blocked for political reasons and LOT remains state-owned.

Indigo Partners is Wizz Air Holdings' largest shareholder with a 23.9% stake.