Hungary’s Malev Increases Traffic

Thanks to Malev’s new commercial strategy, the airline’s passenger traffic once again began to rise from April.

Despite the reduction in turnover characteristic of the industry in the current economic recession, Malev registered growth of 8 percent in its traffic in the second quarter of 2009. The Hungarian carrier is one of only a few European airlines capable of increasing passenger numbers.

At the beginning of this year Malev established its commercial strategy on new foundations, focusing on the airline’s key markets, promotions aimed at new passenger segments, exploiting the network model and boosting market share as well as load factor.

The airline has invigorated sales and marketing with several new commercial tools; it is now present on the market with a new fare structure that represents a constant stream of highly competitive offers for competitors, including low-cost airlines; it has doubled the marketing budget; it runs regular online campaigns; it has introduced a new online reservation system; it has developed the ‘Corporate Saver’ program specifically for corporate clients and introduces package fares with hotels, supermarkets and tour operators.

Malev is particularly concentrating on those markets of crucial importance from the point of view of passenger numbers and revenue, in other words, those destinations that until now have generated the most customers and greatest revenue for the carrier.

The most important routes are primarily West and North European cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Madrid, Brussels and Frankfurt. Besides these, the Athens, Bucharest and Tel Aviv services also bear considerable significance. Malev is devoting significant attention to these markets besides Hungary and it has amplified its marketing and sales activities here.

Malev has increased its market share in Hungary with 3.2 percent to 43.4 percent, which is primarily a result of the increase of the traffic between Budapest and Western Europe, as well as between destinations in Northern or Western Europe and Eastern Europe or the Middle East.