Spanish LCC Volotea has announced a significant increase in its network with plans to launch 40 new sectors over the summer season.
Significantly, many are domestic routes in Mediterranean countries, in an apparent acknowledgment of industry thinking that domestic traffic will be the first to recover as the COVID-19 pandemic starts to relent.
The new routes also show a trend toward routes in countries that have offshore islands as part of their national territory.
Barcelona-based Volotea, which specializes in linking secondary and tertiary airports in western Europe, plans to resume flights from June 16, initially by restarting its contract to shuttle personnel between Airbus facilities in Toulouse and Hamburg.
The carrier has announced 15 new routes in France, a further 15 in Spain, eight in Italy and two in Greece. It says it will be the sole operator on 15 of the 40 sectors. New points on its route network are Beauvais (France), Santiago de Compostela and Granada (Spain) and Bologna (Italy).
“Now that flying protocols are becoming clearer … we know most of our clients will want to travel more, especially in domestic markets,” Volotea’s founder and CEO Carlos Muñoz said. “Therefore, we’ve adapted our network by strongly strengthening all of our domestic connections in Spain, France, Italy and Greece.”
All the new French routes connect to holiday destinations and the airline says it now links almost all the mainland cities on its French route network with Corsica.
In Italy, the new routes focus on increasing connections from the mainland to Sicily and Sardinia.
New Spanish routes show a bias toward increasing links to the Balearics and Canary Island groups, while in Greece Volotea will connect Athens to Corfu, and Santorini to Thessaloniki. It plans also to increase flight frequencies on existing routes between mainland Greece and the nation’s many islands.
According to Aviation Week Intelligence Network Fleet Data, Volotea’s fleet comprises 33 aircraft, including 19 Airbus A319s and 14 Boeing 717s.
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