Wizz Air November passenger numbers grow

Low-cost airline Wizz Air carried 1.49m passengers in November, up 25.5% from the same month last year.

The airline, which focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, reported a load factor – a gauge of how many seats were actually taken up – of 83.6%, up from 82.9%.

On a rolling 12 month basis, it carried 18.9m passengers, up 21.3% from last year and the load factor rose to 87.9% from 86.4%.

The group said it signed its largest ever lease agreement in November for 11 Airbus A321ceo aircraft and expanded its fleet to 64 aircraft with the arrival of its first brand new A321ceo to its Budapest base in Hungary.

It also announced further network expansion with two new routes from/to Romania and Lithuania, including the new destination of Palanga in Lithuania.

Also on Thursday, Wizz Air announced that it will open its 23rd base on 1 July in Iasi, Romania, with one Airbus A320.

Iasi will be Wizz’s sixth Romanian airport with base operations and the aircraft will increase the number of routes served from Iasi to eight and triple the seat capacity to 265,000 in 2016.

The airline will operate five new routes from its Iasi base to Bologna, Catania, Larnaca, Rome Ciampino and Tel Aviv starting 1 July 2016.