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Europe's low-cost airlines are preparing to re-enter Ukraine once a peace deal is signed that allows its airports to reopen to travelers, as they anticipate a boom from "disaster tourism" as well as people returning to the country.
Wizz Air said it planned to have 15 aircraft based in the country within two years of a peace deal, a number that would increase to 50 within seven years, while Ryanair said it could resume services within two weeks of any agreement.
“ We have planned this, as soon as the airspace opens, we will be very quick to re-establish. The reopening would be an important opportunity for us ,” Wizz Air CEO József Váradi told the Financial Times.
In addition to a wave of returning Ukrainians and significant reconstruction work, Váradi predicted a wave of “disaster tourism” in the country, where travelers visit areas hit by man-made or natural disasters.
"When the Berlin Wall fell, millions of people went there to see it ," he said.
Wizz, based in Hungary, was the largest non-Ukrainian airline operating in the country before Moscow's 2022 invasion forced international airlines to suspend operations. Handling more than 5,000 flights to Ukraine in 2021, the group was the third-largest carrier behind Russia's Aeroflot and Windrose, a Ukrainian charter group, that year.
Nearly 15 million passengers flew to Ukraine in 2019, the highest level of air travel before the pandemic. About 10.8 million people flew in 2021, the year before Russia's invasion, according to data from aviation consultancy Cirium.
Ryanair executives have visited Ukraine's main airports with a plan to increase passenger numbers to 4 million. Before the Ukrainian airports were closed, the airline carried around 1.5 million people a year to Kiev, Lviv and Odessa.
" We would have flights within two weeks, it's just a matter of time before it's safe to fly ," executive director Eddie Wilson said in an interview this week.
He said the airline, which has aircraft based at 95 airports across Europe, can open routes from any of its bases without disrupting the rest of its network, allowing the carrier to move faster than rivals with fewer bases.
"You can fly from Dublin, Shannon, Cork, across the UK or Europe, you can have three, four, five flights a week. You can turn back the clock to Ukraine easily. There will be no difficulty in filling 4 million passengers there ," he said.
EasyJet, which previously did not fly to Ukraine, is also considering opening routes there. Chief executive Kenton Jarvis said the country promises to be "the biggest construction project in Europe" and people "will want to come home when it's safe to go home".
Unlike Wizz and Ryanair, it does not plan to have aircraft based in Ukraine in the short term.
The EU Aviation Safety Authority currently advises airlines not to fly over Ukrainian airspace or land there.
“Airspace and critical infrastructure, including airports, are exposed to military activities which result in security risks to civilian aircraft. In particular, there is a risk of deliberate targeting and misidentification of civilian aircraft ,” he warns.
In 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. Data from Cirium shows that only one airline, Russian low-cost carrier Smartavia, has flown into the country in the past two years.
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