Budget airline to begin Ukraine flights

Thursday 5 June 2008

Airline & Airport Updates

Hungarian airline Wizz Air, which offers cheap flights within Europe, will start operating on domestic routes in Ukraine.

The first routes offered will be flights from Kyiv's Boryspil airport to Lviv, Kharkiv, Simferopol and Odesa.

The cost of these flights will be less than the current price of a train ticket.

Three thousand tickets have already been bought since they went on sale on April 25th, Natalya Kazmer, general director at Wizz Air Ukraine, told the Kyiv Post.

Wizz Air's emergence in the Ukrainian airline market is set to grow and will include cheap flights to London Luton, Dusseldorf and Milan Bergamo in September.

Ukraine's air passenger market has grown dramatically in recent years, with an estimated 30 percent expansion projected for 2008 alone.

The sector is highly regulated and is currently dominated by a few Ukrainian airlines charging rates as much as three times higher than the ticket prices offered by budget carriers over similar distances.