Norwegian Air, the big discount operator that’s made itself a serious player in the trans-Atlantic market plans to keep growing that business, with the emphasis on deeper, not wider.
Over the past few years, Norwegian has added route after route between U.S. cities and its European hubs, and has more already announced, but company chair Bjorn Kos says it’s time to add more flights on its successful routes rather than emphasize new ones, although it will add Amsterdam, Madrid and Milan this year. He told an interviewer “For the time being, we need to add more frequencies.”
Most Norwegian flights are on its fleet of 787 Dreamliners, but it has also begun using new 737 MAX single-aisle planes on routes to smaller cities. So far, it has used that strategy for nonstop Europe links from Providence, RI, Newburgh, NY and Hartford, CT. The first two overlap with Boston and New York areas and have been doing well, with Newburgh scheduled to get more connections in the next year.
However, the airline dropped its Hartford flights, which served Edinburgh, Scotland. It blamed the failure of that route on the UK’s air passenger tax and on the fact that neither airport is a real hub for onward connections, and could not generate enough point-to-point business.
