Wizz Air to discontinue Belgrade - Oslo service

Wizz Air’s Belgrade - Oslo flights fail to sell

The low cost airline Wizz Air will discontinue services from Belgrade to Oslo’s secondary airport Sandefjord in Torp, only five months after the route was originally launched on May 31. In a comment to the “Aviokarta” portal, Wizz Air said, “The service to Oslo will not be discontinued but will be suspended during the winter”. As a result, the two weekly flights to the Norwegian capital have been turned into a seasonal summer service. Wizz Air competed against Norwegian Air Shuttle on the route, which operates flights to Belgrade from Norway’s main airport - Oslo Gardermoen. Wizz Air will suspend its Oslo - Belgrade service at the end of the 2013 summer season, in late October.

Wizz Air boosted its services from Belgrade this year, basing a second aircraft in the city. As a result, the airline has seen passenger numbers surge from the city over 50% so far this year. In August alone, the no frills airline handled over 56.000 passengers to and from the Serbian capital with the recently launched service to Paris Beauvais being its busiest.

The only destination Wizz Air had previously discontinued from Belgrade was Rome. The flights to the Italian capital were, similarly to the Oslo service, turned into seasonal flights before they were completely discontinued. Wizz Air sighted high seasonality on the route for its failure.

Wizz Air intends to expand in the coming months throughout the former Yugoslavia with the introduction of a second aircraft in Skopje and the launch of new flights to Charleroi, Beauvais and Frankfurt Hahn next spring. Furthermore, the low cost airline will maintain its newly launched flights to Tuzla in Bosnia over the winter and intends to expand its operation in the country to Sarajevo. Recently, the mayor of Ohrid, in Macedonia, announced the town is prepared to subsidise Wizz Air flights from St. Paul the Apostle Airport to several destinations in Western Europe next summer.