Wizz Air announces new Gatwick base

Wizz Air has announced a new Gatwick base, with routes to Greece, Italy, Spain and Malta.

This is the airline’s third base alongside London Luton and the recently-announced Doncaster Sheffield.

Wizz Air to expand at Doncaster Sheffield airport

The airline will initially base one of its A321 aircraft at Gatwick and launch  four new routes to leisure destinations in Greece, Italy, Spain and Malta from October 22, 2020.

The news will be welcome for Gatwick, which has been battered by the Covid-19 pandemic and has seen Virgin withdraw from the airport.

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Stewart Wingate, CEO at Gatwick Airport, said: “This is encouraging news for Gatwick, particularly at a time when the industry has been so negatively impacted by COVID-19. Having a new aircraft based at Gatwick underpins the resilience of our business for the long-term and ensures we continue to offer our passengers great choice. This is a welcome indication of the positive conversations we are having with airlines – both existing and new – about securing Gatwick’s future.”

Wizz Air has been flying from Gatwick since 2016, carrying almost one million passengers from there in the last four years. The new base will mean a total of 450,000 seats per annum on sale with the new destinations announced including Athens, Naples, Lanzarote and Malta. The airline says the new base will “create over 40 direct jobs and over 125 indirect jobs in the region”.

The addition of these new routes from Gatwick and Doncaster Sheffield means the airline now operates 119 routes to 69 destinations from 11 UK airports. The creation of the two new Wizz Air UK bases follows on from announcements of new bases in Bacău, Dortmund, Lviv, Larnaca, Milan-Malpensa, Tirana, Saint Petersburg and the launch of over 200 new routes across the network since April 2020.

New routes

wizzair.com