Volotea, the Barcelona-headquartered ultra low-cost, has finished its Summer season in Italy by keeping up with the aggressive growth it has been registering since 2019.
The company, from June to August, has registered a 63% growth in the passenger numbers in Italy versus 2020 numbers, transporting 1.46 million customers, while the number of flights grew 39%, to 9.8 thousand, versus the same period in 2020. The registered load factor was at 88%.
In Italy, the airline launched 9 new routes, a small number near Volotea’s 85 new connections; however, the country is still a crucially important market for the airline: 1.7 million of Volotea’s 3.6 million seats offered during Summer passed by Italy.
Of its 17 bases during the season, seven of them were Italian: Cagliari, Genoa, Napoli, Olbia, Palermo, Venice and Verona.
This discrepancy between flights and passengers growth is given by Volotea’s very aggressive fleet strategy: benefitting from lower market rates, in January the company retired the last of its fourteen Boeing 717s, with 125 seats, earlier than expected; all were replaced by Airbus A319s, for 156 passengers, and A320s, for 180.
Besides this growth in number of seats, the fleet also grew; Volotea reached 40 aircraft in Summer, versus 36 in 2019.
Systemwide, the airline has offered 111% more seats versus 2019.
Carlos Muñoz, President and founder of Volotea, said «in this pandemic context, we are very satisfied with our Summer performance in Italy, a country that always plays a fundamental and strategic role in our development plan. We are thankful to our customers and to our workers for the positive feedback and happy to have helped our customers to fly to destinations of their vacations, despite the difficult circumstances that characterize the entire touristic sector».
Despite what the executive said, operationally- wise this was a very complicated Summer for Volotea in Italy. Along with Wizz Air, which also had a strong growth in the country, the airline received a call from ENAC, the national aviation regulator, due to «frequent episodes of flight cancellations, overbooking and prolonged delays […] which caused considerable inconvenience to customers, in some cases also creating problems of public order».
Volotea’s strategy is connecting Europe’s larger cities with medium-sized cities. This allows the airline, in the case of Italy, to operate routes like Nantes-Pisa and Venice-Lyon.
