Wizz Air Expansion at London Gatwick

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In December 2021, Wizz Air purchased 15 pairs of slots from Norwegian at London’s Gatwick Airport. The slot price was not revealed but was rumoured to be around £2m per slot pair. A slot pair consists of both a landing and a departure slot.

Norwegian was able to hold onto their slots, even though they were never likely to use them, due to the current slot waivers in place in the UK (and elsewhere) whereby the usual need to operate at least 80% of slots in order to gain historic rights for these slots, was removed for last summer. Wizz Air was keen to gain entry to Gatwick and Norwegian would have needed to either declare using the slots or sell them by 31 January 2022, in order for the slots to retain the historic rights.

Both Gatwick Airport and Wizz Air, were authors of a joint letter last year (along with Edinburgh and Belfast International airports) to the UK’s department of transport, asking for slot waivers to be removed and for slot rules to be returned to their pre-covid position, requiring 80% of slots to be flown in order for historic rights to be kept. Norwegian, by holding onto slots they were likely not going to use, were accused of blocking other carriers from gaining entry to Gatwick. This provided a difficult challenge for Gatwick as their revenues would be directly linked to the operation of these slots.

Wizz Air has been able to announce 14 new routes from Gatwick for Summer 2022 and they will be increasing their based aircraft from one to five. The new routes are as follows –

Good news then for Wizz Air but equally good news for Gatwick. Based on Wizz Air’s pre-covid load factors and aircraft utilisation rates, it is likely that the new services would generate 3.2 million additional passengers annually. Of course, some of the services announced will be summer only but they are likely to be replaced by winter destinations, allowing Wizz Air to keep their slots on a year-round basis.

The extra movements and passengers will feed through into Gatwick’s aeronautical revenues and the extra passengers will help generate significant non-aero revenues through passengers using Gatwick’s shops and food and beverage outlets.

easyJet and British Airway’s new BA Euroflyer may be the potential losers from Wizz Air’s LGW expansion and it will be interesting to see how this story develops going forward.