Blue Air, the Romanian leader of low-cost airlines running on fully domestic capital, has reported H1 2008 passenger traffic of 425,000, up 21.5% from H1 2007, Blue Air officials inform. The company is this year eyeing total passenger traffic of 1.2 million, up 30% from the year before. The number of passengers surges in summertime and during the winter holidays.
Blue Air’s H1 2008 business turnover neared 49 million euros in the first half of 2008, up 33% from H1 2007. The rise is the result of new services that brought the total weekly flights to 85, up from 66 in June 2007. The 2007 business turnover was 95 million euros, and the company is estimating the figures to go up to 120 million euros in 2008. Blue Air Director General Gheorghe Racaru told daily Business Standard that Blue Air might close the year on losses because of surges in fuel prices.
The company won a tender in 2007 conducted on the Romanian Commodity Exchange for providing air carriage services to the Romanian Post Service, under a three-and-a-half-year contract worth 44.84 million euros, VAT excluded.
Blue Air’s fleet is made up of 8 Boeing 737s, with two more to come by the end of 2009. The company, owned by Romanian businessman Nelu Iordache, who also controls the Romstrade construction company, has 546 employees.
The first best performing three budget airlines in Romania – Blue Air, Wizz Air and MyAir – are together controlling some 80% of the market, having reported 975,000 passengers aboard their internal and external flights in the first half of 2008. Their combined traffic figures exceed the traffic of TAROM, the national air carrier of Romania.
If the low-cost operators manage to reach their traffic objectives for the year, the entire market would get to 3 million passengers, up from less than 2 million passengers in 2007.
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