”To be honest, at the end of last year I thought the first bankruptcy I would hear about on the low-cost airline market would be Wizz Airís,” Stefan Mladin, manager of the Baneasa Airport, the main gateway for low-cost flights in Romania, said last week. Mladin is one of the first people to get a feel the market from the pace at which airlines operating on Baneasa request their slots and had felt a significant slowdown of demand from Wizz Air at the end of last year.

Early in 2009, however, the Hungarian company got a capital inflow and resumed growth. Sky Europe, on the other hand, had significantly reduced the number of flights in Romania by mid last year, when it was operating only two flights from Bucharest and had given up part of its fleet, keeping only five aircraft. Back then, the Slovaks at Sky said they kept only two flights on Baneasa as a result of the partnership they had signed with MyAir (an Italian company that has been operating flights to Italy and France from Baneasa since 2005), which allowed them to operate only on the markets not served by the Italian operator.

”The partnership between Sky Europe and MyAir only entailed selling tickets on the website, with the two companies deciding to complement their flight portfolios by booking seats in each otherís aircraft, but have never operated together,” explains Alina Rus, MyAir manager for the Romanian market. Over the last two years, the Slovakian company has not received any capital inflows from its shareholders, and its shares on the Vienna Stock Exchange, where it is listed, have had a preponderantly negative performance. Sky Europe had started out in 2001 with enough funds from its shareholders, and its fast development drove the national airline carrier out of the market.

At the end of March this year, the company announced a 31.9 million euro net loss for the first half, while debt stood at more than 100 million euros. After these results were published, the officials of the company in Bratislava tried a number of strategies to rebound, but last week they filed bankruptcy-law protection to be able to start a reorganisation and streamlining programme. The last campaign conducted by those at Sky Europe was one in which they sold 1 million tickets for 1 euro each, which made more than 100,000 CEE passengers buy tickets for this summer. The company announced it will operate the flights, but problems began soon after announcing bankruptcy on several airports to which Sky Europe owed money. Low fare campaigns have been the main weapon used to gain market share by low-cost airlines in Romania over the past year.

Traducere de Loredana Fratila-Cristescu si Daniela Stoican