The UK’s largest airline, easyJet, has announced that it will open a new base at London Southend Airport from April 2012.
The base will open with three A319 aircraft and over 150 employees, with around 800,000 passengers expected to fly in the first year.
Seventy easyJet flights per week will operate to around 10 different European destinations including Barcelona, Faro and Ibiza. Tickets will go on sale at the end of July this year.
The new base will be easyJet’s eleventh in the UK.
A brand new, multi-million-pound terminal is due to open at London Southend Airport in autumn this year. The airport has a target customer base of over two million passengers annually.
Catherine Lynn, easyJet’s Customer and Revenue director, said: “We are excited to be opening London Southend as easyJet’s 20th base airport. The airport is in a fantastic location just outside London with a fast rail link into the city. This is a unique opportunity to offer a world class customer experience, with passengers able to get from the plane to the train in 15 minutes.
“Through offering easy and affordable travel, we expect the new routes to appeal to customers in Essex and London looking for a convenient new departure point for many top European destinations. We also believe that the European city links will also attract a high number of inbound business and leisure passengers to London next year.”
London Southend Airport’s managing director, Alastair Welch, said: “We are delighted to announce our partnership with easyJet, servicing a comprehensive variety of routes into Europe and hot on the heels of other significant developments at London Southend. This summer we open a dedicated railway station with up to eight services an hour to Stratford—site of the 2012 games, and to London Liverpool Street, both in well under an hour.
“A new state-of-the-art control tower is now operational, work on our runway extension is underway, as is a new terminal building to be completed this autumn, and a new hotel that will open in 2012.”
easyJet has a leading presence on Europe’s top 100 routes and at Europe’s 50 largest airports. The airline flies on more than 550 routes between 130 airports in 30 countries. More than 300 million Europeans live within one hour’s drive of an easyJet airport.
