C-SUITE
Wizz Air announced a full brand rejuvenation on its 11th anniversary.
was still a service offered to privileged people. “We believed that flying should be much more accessible. We thought we could reform travel by making it more affordable,” he said. The second was the EU’s eastward expansion, which opened new markets to fly to underserved central and eastern European destinations with growing economies. During the 2014 WTM interview, Váradi elaborated on why timing was crucial to launching Wizz Air: “I don’t think we could have done it before, because the regulatory environment was just not available for such initiatives, and we couldn’t have done it later, because competition would have taken over the market by that time.”
“To succeed in the airline sector, you need to fight for your survival, you need to prove yourself, and I think that’s the personal challenge in what I did.”
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On May 19, 2004 – the month that Hungary, along with seven other central and eastern European countries joined the European Union – Wizz Air launched its first commercial flight, from Katowice International Airport in southern Poland, an airport Váradi described as being “literally in the middle of nowhere.” Given Váradi’s history with Malév, he said that Wizz Air chose to begin operations from Poland “in case the Hungarians would go against the initiative and potentially kill it.” >
PHOTO: WIZZ AIR
The following year, Hungarians went to the polls to vote in a referendum that would steer the nation’s course for decades. The country voted overwhelmingly (83.3 percent) in favor of joining the European Union. It meant Hungary would be a member of the world’s largest economic bloc and its citizens would be free to live and work anywhere in the EU. Spotting an opportunity, Váradi teamed up with five other people, and three months later registered an airline under the name Wizz Air. The group had decided from the get-go to operate Wizz Air as a low-cost carrier (LCC). The airline had managed to secure financial backing from Indigo Partners, a US-based private equity firm that also holds stakes in other LCCs around the world. “We concluded very quickly that we would pursue the low-cost airline model,” he said in the WTM interview. Aware of what Ryanair and easyJet were doing in Europe, Váradi traveled to North America to get a perspective on what LCCs like WestJet, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines were doing on the other side of the Atlantic. In a 2016 interview with Emerging Europe, Váradi explained that the idea for Wizz Air was predicated on two factors. The first was that in the early 2000s, flying