Tamás Vargha, State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, reported at the official press conference that the state helped launch the flights with HUF 300 million. In a flight development tender announced to support the activities of air carriers, Debrecen Airport won this amount specifically for this purpose.
Vargha pointed out that the airline has been operating flights from Debrecen since 2012, and its base here has expanded significantly in recent years.
The development of the airport and the operation of Wizz Air have greatly contributed to the fact that more and more international companies have chosen and are choosing Debrecen as their investment location, he added.
Last year, 42 investment projects were implemented in the region of Hajdú-Bihar and Debrecen, with a worth of about EUR 2 billion and preserving and creating 10,000 jobs, the state secretary said.
András Sebők, chief operating officer of Wizz Air Hungary Ltd., said that two new flights to Brussels-Charleroi and Kiev are scheduled to start December 14-15. From the end of October and the beginning of November, the previously popular Tel Aviv and Moscow flights may resume as well, and Wizz Air has already launched flights to Santorini in Greece this summer.
Sebők indicated that with the new flights, Wizz Air will be able to add about 75,000 new seats to its flight capacity this year.
László Papp, Mayor of Debrecen, said that the airport restarted this summer after COVID-19. Flights to London, Paris, Mallorca and Cyprus resumed first, while the flights to Tel Aviv and Moscow were and are extremely important for tourism of the region, he stressed.
After flights began to these two cities, the number of guest nights spent by Israeli and Russian tourists multiplied compared to the previous data, and a similar increase is expected from the new flight to Kiev, the mayor added.
In 2020, Debrecen Airport had slightly more than 120,000 passengers, which is significantly lower than the peak of 600,000 registered in 2019.
