Wizz Air might be back in Baku

By Amina Nazarli - AzerNews 

Hungary’s largest low-cost airline, Wizz Air, might come back to Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijani airlines (AZAL) is waiting for a response from the Hungarian airline on its proposal for the resumption of flights to Baku, Arif Mammadov, AZAL’s vice-president said on July 22.

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 ticket cost 160 euros, which made the company popular among Azerbaijanis and European tourists visiting Baku. As of January 2014, passenger traffic exceeded 14,000 people over a period of six months.

Mammadov said that the main reason for the initial misunderstanding between the two companies was the refusal of the low-fare airline to fly during the winter season, which is why AZAL offered the Hungarian company a new deal for three years stipulating that the company will not give up its winter flights.

“We do not impose any restrictions on their activities in Azerbaijan. On the contrary, Wizz Air was operating here for big savings. We had signed the three-year contract with the company, but Wizz Air did not pay for the services rendered at the Heydar Aliyev International Airport,” the company’s vice president said.

Wizz Air, the largest low-fare airline in Central and Eastern Europe, 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.