Wizz Air will grow more than 30% this 2024 at Barcelona Airport

In a summer expected to be a record-breaker at Barcelona Airport, Wizz Air will be one of the airlines increasing its offer this 2024, with a 32% growth compared to last year, reaching a total of 2.9 million seats, distributed across 18 routes to 10 countries. In the summer months alone, the company will schedule 1.7 million seats at El Prat.

The increase of the Hungarian low cost airline in the Catalan capital is fundamentally based on the incorporation of the connection with Milan, operational since the end of last year. But frequencies and seats offered on existing routes, such as those to Rome, have also grown. With this commitment to El Prat, Wizz Air became the third airline at the airport in the first quarter of 2024, unseating easyJet and only behind Vueling and Ryanair.

In Spain as a whole, where it has no base, Wizz Air will grow 31% year-on-year, reaching 8.5 million seats this year. Currently, it schedules 90 routes to 23 destinations in 11 countries. This year it will reach 15 Spanish airports, incorporating Gran Canaria. Since it began flying in the country 20 years ago, the airline has accumulated more than 30 million passengers. Both Italian cities are among the most popular destinations in Spain for Wizz Air, accompanied by others such as its hometown, Budapest, but also Vienna, Warsaw, and Bucharest. The only connection Barcelona has pending with this company is London.

Although Wizz Air landed in Spain for the first time at Girona Airport, with a first flight to Budapest in June 2004, the company stopped operating in the Girona infrastructure. In Catalonia, it focused on Barcelona, where it arrived for the first time a few months later, in October 2004, and has already accumulated more than 12 million passengers. This is an exception to its business model, in which it prefers the secondary airports of the large destinations it serves.

Globally, the airline operates some 800 routes in 50 countries, mainly in Europe. It has 216 aircraft, with an average age of 4.33 years. Born 20 years ago, it has already accumulated 375 million passengers transported, with 60.3 million in 2023, a figure that shows its recovery after COVID and the return to the growth trend of the years prior to 2020.