The Dutch low-cost airline Transavia has been toying with a base at Brussels Airport for a long time. CEO Marcel de Nooijer reaffirmed this and holds out the prospect of summer 2022 as a possible date.

Amsterdam Airport Schiphol was considered chronically congested before the corona pandemic. In order to be able to provide a remedy, the Lelystad airport is to be expanded and low-cost and charter flights in particular are to start from here. The project is massively controversial and stalled due to numerous lawsuits. It is currently completely unclear whether the expanded Lelystad Airport will ever be able to fulfill its intended purpose.

Transavia would very much like to take off from the latter airport, but this is not possible at the moment. This uncertain situation is causing the carrier to pull the old Brussels plan out of the drawer. Speaking to Financieel Dagblad, managing director de Nooijer said about Belgium: “We will see if we can start an operation there. We want to be able to grow further in the coming years ”. However, the manager rules out a connection with the comparatively high airport charges in Schiphol.

Schiphol is “home base, but not at any price”

Nevertheless, he puts the route in the window: “Schiphol is our home base, but not at any price”. The background to this is that the fees will rise by around 40 percent. The Transavia boss describes this as “unfair” and calculates: “We will pay almost 20 million euros more than in 2019. You don't see that at any other airport.”

Furthermore, the KLM subsidiary also has to make a contribution in connection with the state aid that the Dutch government had granted to the parent company. You have to reduce the direct costs by 15 percent. De Nooijer considers this to be a difficult undertaking if at the same time the largest supplier, i.e. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, wants to increase prices by around 40 percent. “This increase is not healthy for Dutch aviation,” said the manager.

Sharp criticism of Amsterdam Airport

De Nooijer also criticizes the fact that Schiphol would be in good financial shape and could easily compensate for the crisis by foregoing dividend payments, for example. The airport would also earn better by ending its cooperation with Aéroports de Paris.

Transavia was able to land quite a considerable number of bookings in the summer months, but according to the company boss this is not enough to fly into the black. De Nooijer reckons that Transavia and Transavia France will incur a loss of “several tens of millions of euros”. In the first few months of 2021 alone, the two carriers had a deficit of 218 million euros. It will most likely not be able to make up for this. In the previous year, Transavia made a loss of 120 million euros. This was kept low by the so-called NOW scheme. If you hadn't received this support, you would have lost 200 million euros.

Passengers book at very short notice

Nevertheless, Marcel de Nooijer is confident that the recovery has started. He points out that in August 2021, around 85 percent of the 2019 level could be performed. However, the booking behavior has changed significantly. Tickets are no longer booked early, but rather at short notice. The manager explains that purchases are usually made within the month of departure. This development has to be taken into account when planning.

For the year 2022, de Nooijer expects that Transavia and Transavia France together will have around 95 percent of the capacity of 2019 in the air. Only towards the end of the second half of 2023 does he assume that the level of 2019 can be reached or, ideally, even exceeded. There may already be a base in Brussels by then.

Basis Munich was a flop

Incidentally, Transavia has not had any good experiences in the past with bases outside France or the Netherlands. At the end of March 2016, four Boeing 737s were initially stationed at Munich Airport and an attempt was made to attack the top dog Lufthansa with the help of a large advertising campaign. But it was only a short guest appearance, as the Munich base was closed again at the beginning of the 2017/18 winter flight planning period.

Coincidentally, exactly at this point in time, the Lufthansa Group began to increasingly use the Eurowings brand from the second largest crane base. Air France-KLM then evidently avoided this competition. Incidentally, there was also the absurd circumstance at Transavia that many pilots were flown in from the Netherlands and France to start their service from Munich. The exact background is still unclear, but it can be assumed that it could have been a concession to the trade unions.

The closure of the Munich base was justified by the then Transavia boss, Mattijs ten Brink, as follows: “We have now decided to change our strategy and concentrate on growth within our home market. For this reason and because of the carefully evaluated profitability prospects, a base in Munich is no longer part of this strategy ”.