Volotea launched its first flight to Lyon at april 2018 and already serves Prague all year round, as well as Venice for a few weeks now. The niche regional airline also offers high season services to Cagliari in Sardinia, Palma de Mallorca, Palermo, Split and Valencia.
The announcement to base a device Airbus A319 from the summer season (March 2020) will help Volotea to become one of the world's leading airlines. Lyon's third largest carrierafter the Air France KLM group and easyJet.
With this sixth base in FranceVolotea has announced that it will be opening ten new routes airlines, offering more than 310,000 seats all year round. The company will even have a monopoly on six of these new routes.
Future lines will link Lyon to Athens, Corfu, Heraklion, Santorini, Bilbao, Malaga, Bari, Venice, Caen and Faro. The airline will operate an average of two weekly frequencies to each of these destinations. At the same time as opening these new routes, the airline will also be increasing its frequencies to Palma de Mallorca, Split and Valencia.
Lyon is already a major low-cost base for companies easyJet and Transavia. In 2018, on the 11.04 million passengers visitors to Lyon, 4.26 million of them travelled on a low-cost carrier, which represented a market share of 38.6%. The arrival of Volotea and the increased capacity of easyJet and Transavia should push the traffic of low-cost airlines to exceed 40% market share in Lyon by 2020.
Volotea's fleet consists of 19 Airbus A319s and 17 Boeing 717s. Next year, the airline will add five more Airbus A319s.
