Wizz Air to return to Baku in March
By Nigar Orujova
Wizz Air will resume flights between Hungarian capital Budapest and Azerbaijan’s Baku starting March 2016, said Azerbaijani Airlines Vice President Arif Mammadov on October 23.
He said that a contract will be signed with Hungary’s largest low-cost airline on October 28.
“We have agreed to the terms of Wizz Air for 99 percent,” said Mammadov. “A delegation of the Hungarian airline will arrive in Baku on October 27.”
“The contract will be signed on terms that are preferential for the Hungarian company on October 28. Wizz Air was offered to operate to Gabala, but the airline insisted on Baku, and we agreed on this issue,” said Mammadov.
He noted that the Hungarian airline will start operating flights between Budapest and Baku from March next year.
“We offered them to begin flights in the winter, but they decided to start in March,” said Mammadov. “First, flight frequency will be one flight in a week and in the summer will increase to two flights a week.”
“At the same time, we put a condition not to stop flights in winter, otherwise the contract will be terminated and such benefits won’t be provided,” he said.
Direct flights between Baku and Budapest began in June 2013 in accordance with a memorandum of cooperation signed by the civil aviation administrations of the two countries.
Wizz Air, however, indefinitely postponed flights from Baku to Europe this March and compensated existing ticketholders for 20 percent of the full airfare.
Before the incident, round-trip airfare from Baku to Budapest cost 160 euros, which made the company popular among Azerbaijanis and European tourists visiting Baku.
The largest low-fare airline in Central and Eastern Europe, Wizz Air, earlier had announced that it would resume flights from Baku to Budapest in April as part of the intergovernmental agreement on air service.
Due to the large flow of tourists using this route to Europe, Hungary even planned to open a visa center in Baku for rendering technical services and issuing Schengen visas for the citizens of Azerbaijan.
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Nigar Orujova is AzerNews’s staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar
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