Transylvanian Express: British Airways takes on Wizz Air and Ryanair with flights to eastern Europe

Plane Talk: BA chooses a quartet of Iron Curtain destinations

Friendly and fascinating, the market square in Wroclaw (Getty)

The city’s airport is named for Nicolaus Copernicus, commemorating Poland’s Renaissance astronomer; the hotels and restaurants are excellent value, including the former abattoir now known as jaDka; and the Second World War destruction was so severe and long lasting that Steven Spielberg chose it for a stand-in for 1960s East Berlin for his Cold War thriller, Bridge of Spies.

I hope, one day, you will visit the friendly and fascinating city of Wroclaw in southwest Poland.

Perhaps you prefer Gdansk in the nation’s northwest, with its formidable European Solidarity Centre celebrating democracy; or the Soviet echoes of the Latvian capital, Riga? 

All three will be on the departures board at Heathrow airport this summer – as will Cluj-Napoca, de facto capital of Romania’s Transylvania region.

BA has chosen to deploy its slots, its aircraft and its crew to a quartet of Iron Curtain destinations.

Up to the start of 2020, I would have offered you extremely long odds against the likes Cluj-Napoca ever being served from Britain’s busiest airport. Heathrow slots were worth a fortune because they could generate handsome returns on flights to business destinations across Europe and the world, with companies happily forking out a fortune to fly their executives in comfort.

Yet amazingly British Airways won’t be the only carrier on the route; Blue Air, a Romanian budget carrier, has been temporarily granted slots at Heathrow and will use some of them for its “Transylvanian Express”.

Flying to secondary cities in eastern Europe is a brutal business. On 26 September, for example, Blue Air wants just £20 – while British Airways is charging three times as much. 

So why is BA straying into the hornet’s nest of eastern Europe? The region has long been fought over by Europe’s two ultra-low-cost carriers, Ryanair and Wizz Air, as well as smaller airlines such as Blue Air and the national carriers of Poland and Latvia, LOT and Baltic respectively.

Because in a summer of uncertainty, BA hopes it can fill some planes – even if the fares are way below what it would normally collect from its Heathrow holiday heartlands of Athens, Nice and Venice. The airline is banking on being able to attract some VFR (“visiting friends and relatives”) traffic.

London is such a huge city compared with anywhere else in western Europe, that there is probably a decent market in targeting the west Londoners. The area has a big Polish community, for example.

British Airways believes it can attract a good few of them with a 26-minute, £7.80 rail journey from Ealing Broadway compared with the arduous and expensive journeys to Luton (for Wizz Air) or Stansted (for Ryanair). Add in a hyper-generous free cabin baggage allowance - two bags totalling 46kg - and BA is probably right.

The UK airline schedule analyst Sean Moulton says: “In the short term, these four new routes could generate decent load factors. But time will tell if British Airways returns to business flying or maintains lower yield routes such as these.”

Don’t dawdle if you are keen to try the flights. I will give you extremely long odds that all four cities reappear on the British Airways schedule next summer. So start planning an Iron Curtain adventure.