There’s some consolidation coming to Norway’s airline industry…
Continue reading: Norwegian Acquiring Regional Airline Widerøe
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Kind of a disappointing thing tbh. Norwegian is a low cost carrier - while Widerøe is quite the opposite. Flew them in February 2019 on the E190-E2. An incredible flight. Lovely staff, delicious snacks and coffee. They even did a drawing for a credit since it was their anniversary.
Norwegian could treat Widerøe as a feeder airline like AA and American Eagle. Each has as its own management, fleet, marketing, etc. However, Norwegian & Widerøe are listed as a single unit on reservations webpages. Seamless trip integration.
Another avenue is for Norwegian to eventually treat Widerøe as a subsidiary. Eventually, all back office processes (payroll, management, purchasing, HR, scheduling, etc) are handled by Norwegian. Similar to the current situation with Aegean (trunk line) & Olympic (feeder service to the islands). However, still listed as a single unit on reservation webpages for seamless trip integration.
To get the full utilization, Widerøe could be assigned additional airports that are cost prohibitive to Norwegian allowing hand offs at designated hubs. This would provide full leverage of the purchase.
Widerøe always fascinated me as a small yet seemingly very distinct and authentic Scandinavian airline, really wanted to fly them. Better hurry up now I suppose.
This is not the only development in Norwegian aviation this year. There was a short-lined low-cost carrier called Flyr that operated ex-DY 737s and folded in January.
short-lived*
Interestingly, Flyr was launched in June 2021, the same month as PLAY in Iceland, and liquidated on 31 January, the same day that Bonza launched in Australia. Its entire fleet came from Norwegian, I believe.
How many people were first introduced to wideroe when they had that blare glitch back in 2013(?) A few friends and I had a fantastic trip to Italy on that. I flew wideroe out of desperation last summer when I had several flights canceled due to the SAS strike, and they were great. Hope the company and brand are maintained in the long term after this merger.
Yes! Came to the comment section to refer to that glitch. Ended up going to India for a week for under $300 in Y+. Thank you Wideroe!
Goodbye Wideroe! Running two separate airlines never works. It is only a matter of time.