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Wizz Air Sees A 415% Passenger Increase In March
BY JAKOV FABINGER
PUBLISHED 17 HOURS AGO
Wizz Air reveals its performance statistics for March 2022, including the carrier's load factor.

Wizz Air Q3 2021 resultsPhoto: Getty Images
Wizz Air has released its performance statistics for March 2022. Most figures are impressive, but some concerns remain. Let’s take a look at what the numbers reveal.

Wizz Air is on the up
Wizz Air revealed that it had a strong March this year, with 2,476,105 passengers booking tickets on its flights. This is an increase of 415.6% compared to March 2021. The airline’s load factor stood at 86.2%, less than a percentage point lower than rival Ryanair’s load factor for March 2022.

In March, the Hungarian airline offered 2,871,848 seats across all the flights in its global network, up from the 768,113 it had offered in March 2021. This constitutes a capacity increase of 273.9%. Coupled with a passenger increase of 415.6%, which means that the airline has seen a markedly better March 2022 than March 2021.

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The shrinking difference between seat capacity offered by Wizz Air and the number of passengers that the airline carried has resulted in a stellar improvement of 23.7 percentage points in its load factor compared to the past year. In March 2021, the load factor was only 62.5%.

The performance trend is equally positive when looking at the past 12 months. In the year up to March 31, 2022, Wizz Air saw 27,079,918 bookings against a scheduled seat capacity of 34,625,404. This gave it a load factor of 78.2%, which is an impressive figure considering that this period includes the tail-end of the winter 2020 and spring 2021 lockdowns imposed while European countries were rolling out vaccinations and also the winter 2021/2022 slump in demand caused by the discovery of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.


Wizz-Air-CO2-Emissions-getty
Wizz Air is offering over 20,000 flights in April 2022, and it hopes for more growth. Photo: Getty Images.
The environment remains a focus for Wizz Air
The airline has continued to push sustainability as part of its brand image in March. It calls itself the most sustainable European airline. Driving its environmental sustainability is its young fleet and a relatively high load factor.

For March 2022, Wizz Air estimates it emitted 233,733 tonnes of CO2. This is a marked increase compared to March 2021, when the airline’s CO2 emissions were 56,366. The increase is as high as 314.7%.

However, this percentage increase is lower than the percentage increase in passenger traffic. Thus, the metric of CO2 grams per passenger per kilometer actually fell between March 2021 and March 2022. For this March, it was 56.0 CO2 grams per passenger/km. For last March, it was 72.9.


GettyImages-1229768223 Wizz Air UK Airbus A321neo
The airline has faced staff shortages in the past, and it was overly optimistic about passenger demand during the pandemic. Photo: Getty Images

The airline continues to grow, but concerns remain
In other developments last month, Wizz Air announced it would support Ukrainian refugees by offering them 100,000 free seats on all flights within continental Europe that depart countries that border Ukraine: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. This offer is valid until April 10, 2022.

The airline also added another aircraft to its Budapest base, for a total of 12, and one to Cluj-Napoca, for a total of seven.

However, not all is going smoothly with the airline. Wizz has been badly exposed to recent oil price rises because, up until recently, it had chosen not to hedge any of its fuel requirements.


Wizz Air’s share price has tumbled nearly 40% this year as the airline made expansionary moves in 2020 and 2021 that turned out to be too bold for market conditions in Europe that remain heavily hindered by a pandemic yet to end.


https://simpleflying.com/wizz-air-415-percent-passenger-increase-march-2022/