Low-cost airlines Ryanair, Wizz Air and Eurowings are currently preparing for a possible significant drop in demand. Affected are numerous routes from Germany, which will be served less frequently in the future or even temporarily sent to a complete winter break.

The flight plan data published by the providers mentioned so far shows that a wide variety of destinations and airports in Germany are affected by the cuts or cancellations. Eurowings is suspending some classic summer routes a little earlier than originally planned. However, no significant cuts have been made for the 2022/23 winter flight schedule.

In contrast, Ryanair and Wizz Air have already removed significant frequencies and entire routes from the 2022/23 winter timetable. With the pink-colored provider, significant reductions or temporary winter settings can be seen in the entire route network. Notably, typical visiting friends and relatives goals are also affected. The Irish competitor tends to focus on tourist destinations.

Eurowings continues to reduce frequencies

The competitor Eurowings will continue the cuts, which were made among other things due to a lack of staff on the destinations offered from Cologne/Bonn to Klagenfurt, Dublin and Budapest, contrary to previous flight schedule data, until the end of the 2022 summer period. The same applies to the destinations Zagreb, Bucharest, Gdansk, Bergamo and Belgrade offered from Düsseldorf. From Stuttgart-Echterdingen, the destination Bilbao is affected. The operational break on the domestic German route to Dresden will be extended indefinitely.

Eurowings is no longer flying to Alicante from Hamburg ahead of schedule. Gothenburg will be suspended from August 26, 2022 until the end of the current summer period of 2023. The same applies to Belgrade from Stuttgart, but this route will only be temporarily discontinued on September 12, 2022. Kraków, on the other hand, will not be reactivated that day, but will remain paused until at least the end of October 2022. The flights from Stuttgart to Timișoara announced for September 2, 2022 have been put on hold because there is no fixed new date yet.

Wizz Air reverses typical VFR routes

Wizz Air will pause the recently launched connection between Saarbrücken and Sarajevo, which is still advertised as "new", from December 3, 2022 to January 17, 2023 for the time being. From the base in Bosnia-Herzegovina, numerous other routes will be reduced or put on temporary winter breaks. In Italy and the United Kingdom, too, cutbacks are being used heavily. For example, the Cardiff base will go on a temporary winter break from mid-September 2022.

In Germany, Wizz Air will reduce the number of weekly flights to Belgrade and Vilnius from Dortmund in winter 2022/23. For the time being, it is envisaged that the withdrawal of the frequencies will be limited to between the beginning of December 2022 and mid-January 2023. The destinations Budapest, Sibiu, Timișoara, Kattowitz and Sofia are also affected by reductions.

Wizz Air is also making cutbacks from Cologne/Bonn, because Gdansk, Varna and Katowice are to be reduced. Sofia, Nis, Varna, Skopje and Pristina am Memmingen are also affected. From Frankfurt-Hahn, the low-cost airline is reducing the flight frequencies to Tuzla, Tirana and Belgrade. Varna, Gdansk, Tirana and Belgrade are served less frequently from Hamburg.

A few Germany adjustments at Ryanair

From Weeze, Ryanair will not offer the destinations Oradea and Liverpool in the 2022/23 winter flight schedule. The destination Budapest is temporarily omitted from Cologne/Bonn. Not many flight adjustments to/from Germany have been made at the moment. However, the low-cost airline will cancel some routes from Malta, Sweden, Spain, Latvia, Romania, UK, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Croatia, Italy, Morocco, Hungary, Finland, Poland and other countries. According to the current state of affairs, the destinations Suceava and Zadar offered from Vienna are affected from Austria.

A few days ago, Ryanair Group circles said that demand in the 2022/23 winter flight schedule was expected to be significantly lower than in summer 2022. When there are many bases, the focus will be on the weekends. Other airline groups are also saying that they are expecting a "hard winter".