Low cost carrier Wizz Air will restore its entire network out of Skopje on June 1 after two and a half years. The carrier will resume flights to Budapest, Malta, Vaxjo, Bremen and Bologna next week, as well as inaugurate its new service to Turin, which had previously been delayed. Furthermore, the airline will increase frequencies on a number of services among which are Berlin, Basel, Copenhagen, Cologne, Malmo, Billund, Nuremberg, Turku and Friedrichshafen. Wizz is also increasing its pre-pandemic capacity in the Macedonian capital. The airline will have three 230-seat Airbus A321 aircraft stationed in the city along with a further two 180-seat A320s. Prior to the global health emergency, its Skopje fleet consisted mostly of A320s.
Wizz Air initially planned to restore its summer network earlier during the 2022 summer season. However, Skopje’s runway overhaul, which ran from March 28 until yesterday, limited the airport’s operational hours to between 17.00 and 09.00 the following day. A two-week delay in the project’s completion further pushed back the airline’s flight resumption plans. Overall, Wizz Air will maintain operations from Skopje to 31 points in Europe. Following the height of the pandemic, the airline briefly restored, but later terminated, services to Barcelona, Larnaca and Hanover, while Salzburg was launched in the summer of 2020 only to be discontinued a week later as Austria introduced a complete ban on flights to a number of Balkan countries. The service has not been restored since.
Wizz Air’s CEO, Jozsef Varadi, visited Skopje last month. The carrier is preparing to take part in the Macedonian government’s tender aimed at subsidising the launch of new routes, which it has won on all three previous occasions. Tender procedures are likely to kick off this summer with Wizz considering flights from Skopje to Slovenia, as well as a destination on the Croatian coast, Prague and the resumption of some of the abovementioned routes discontinued by the carrier from the Macedonian capital. New services from Ohrid are also expected.