Norwegian is once again betting on Barcelona. After closing its operational base at El Prat Airport in 2021, the low-cost airline will recover it for the summer season of 2023, but it will do so on a seasonal basis and with changes. Previously, it had five planes that covered international routes from the Catalan capital. With the recent reformulation of the company, which has abandoned long-haul flights, the new Barcelona base will only cover short-haul flights and will do so with two planes.
The routes that these two planes will operate have not yet been specified. According to the Norwegian airline, the future base will serve to reinforce the company's Nordic connectivity with the Catalan capital, so flights are expected to go to capitals or second-tier cities in the Nordic region.
The reopening of the base in El Prat will mean the hiring of between 60 and 70 workers in Spain, including pilots and cabin crew. It is expected that all of them will be former employees of the airline who were affected by the employment regulation file (ERE) a year ago, which led to the dismissal of 800 workers. According to the agreement reached with the unions, a job bank was created for those crew members who wanted to return to work for the company "in the event of future production increases."
The reactivation of operations in Barcelona is part of the growing demand for travel that the company is registering, which has just closed a second quarter with five million passengers, compared to 0.4 million in the same period of 2021 and 2.2 million in the first quarter of this year. The average occupancy rate stood at 85% in June, a figure that rose in July. In this fiscal year, the airline operates 40 routes between the Nordic countries and Spain, with six having El Prat as their destination.
All in all, Norwegian will have eight planes based in Spain next summer season, which will start in March. In addition to the two in Barcelona, it will have three in Alicante and another three in Malaga, the only two Spanish bases that escaped the ERE, which also meant the closure of those in Gran Canaria and Tenerife. Across Europe, the company will hire 300 pilots and 500 cabin crew throughout 2023, a year in which it will incorporate 15 new planes, reaching a total fleet of 85 planes.
Despite the cuts, the airline maintained its corporate headquarters in Barcelona since 2015 as a center for its Southern European operations. Today, it is one of its three administrative headquarters, along with those in Oslo (Norway) and Riga (Latvia), after closing those in London and Dublin.
What did happen was its relocation from El Prat de Llobregat to Cornellà de Llobregat, moving away from the airport facilities. The low-cost airline had been located in the Mas Blau II business park in El Prat since 2018, with more than 5,000 square meters. That location had been chosen due to the growth in activity it had registered, which forced it to leave behind the offices it had in the old control tower near the airport's T2 terminal. But, with the restructuring it began in 2018, accelerated by the pandemic crisis, it moved to the World Trade Center Almeda Park and reduced the contracted area to 1,500 square meters, occupying modules C and D on the first floor of building 8 of the business complex. Approximately 120 people currently work in these offices.