Wizz Air (W6, Budapest) will close its base in Lublin effective mid-June 2018. The sole A320 based at this airport will be relocated to Katowice Pyrzowice. The airline will also launch a number of new routes from Ukraine.
Wizz Air's base in Lublin, opened in September 2015, was the sixth Polish base of the low-cost carrier. According to ch-aviation sources, the airline cited "operational efficiency" reasons in internal communications with the airport in eastern Poland.
After relocating the A320-100/-200 to Katowice, Wizz Air will launch six new routes from there: 4x weekly service to Memmingen and 2x weekly services to Porto, Faro, Kharkiv, Malaga and Podgorica. At the same time, Lublin will lose connections to Doncaster/Sheffield, Liverpool and Tel Aviv Ben Gurion. Other services to Lublin will be operated with A320s from other bases. Lublin will seek to reestablish the lost routes with other carriers, notably Ryanair and easyJet, airport sources told ch-aviation.
Katowice is currently one of the largest Wizz Air bases with six A320 family aircraft stationed there and 98 weekly departures, according to the ch-aviation schedules module.
Wizz Air also announced plans to significantly grow in Ukraine. The airline will relaunch flights to Kharkiv after a four-year gap. Besides the aforementioned operations from Katowice, the airline will also fly to the eastern Ukrainian city from Dortmund 2x weekly from April 2018. The LCC will also boost its presence in Lviv with new flights to Gdansk (2x weekly from March 2018) and Katowice (2x weekly from March 2018, increased to 4x weekly from June 2018).
The Hungarian low-cost carrier is currently the third-largest airline by capacity in Poland with a 20.05% share and in Ukraine with 5.13% according to ch-aviation's capacity data. Air traffic from Ukraine to Poland has been growing by double-digits for the last two years, fueled by labour migration. According to some estimates, by the end of 2017 there will be around two million Ukrainians working in Poland.
