HOLIDAYMAKERS will soon have six more destinations to fly to from Southend Airport after easyJet announced it is re-opening its base.
The budget airline will be basing three aircraft at the airport from March next year, it announced on Thursday.
It previously had a base at Southend Airport which closed in 2020 as the country entered lockdown when the coronavirus pandemic struck.
The airline will be adding flights to Gran Canaria, Pisa in Italy, Antalya and Dalaman in Turkey, Enfidha in Tunisia, and Marrakech in Morocco to its offering from Southend.
Ali Gayward, UK country manager for the airline, said easyJet is also looking at “adding a number of other destinations”.
“We look at what the demand is for our customers and what we’re seeing is popular from other airports too,” she said.
“We’re seeing now that destinations such as the Greek islands, places like Egypt and Morocco and Tunisia, as well as the classics of the Portuguese Algarve and mainland Spain are hugely popular with our customers.
“We’ll be looking at those trends and evaluating what works best as well as looking at where our business travellers in the region want to travel to.”
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Ms Gayward said the reintroduction of a base at Southend Airport, where the airline has been flying for more than ten years, is a “great opportunity” for passengers.
She said: “We see it as a great opportunity to serve some of that demand that we see from the region and indeed from the whole of the south east; demand that we’re not able to take currently out of our other operations in the area.”
Flights will go on sale later this year while package holidays from Southend, easyJet’s tenth base in the UK, will go on sale through its sister company easyJet Holidays from Friday.
The new base will create about 130 direct jobs for pilots and crew in the UK and support many more indirect jobs, the airline said.
The airline also launched a base at Birmingham International Airport in March as part of its strategy to conquer “key growth opportunities”.
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