HiSky's Two-Year Review – Performance, Challenges and Future Outlook

HiSky celebrates on Sunday, March 5th, the anniversary of the first two years’ operating regular and charter flights, for the Romanian and Moldovan markets. The company, founded by two entrepreneurs from the Republic of Moldova, obtained its air operator certificate in the two countries at the beginning of 2021. Despite the strong negative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the sector, HiSky reports a constant increase in the number of destinations, flights and passengers in the first two years of activity and has ambitious plans for the period ahead.

More than 900,000 passengers traveled with HiSky between 2021-2022 and the first two months of 2023, with a reported increase for 2022 of 300% over the previous year’s numbers. At the end of 2021, in the context of global levels for air passenger traffic more than 50% lower than in the pre-pandemic period, the airline was reporting 200,000 passengers carried.

In its first two years, HiSky operated, with the five aircraft in the fleet, more than 8,600 flights, accumulating an estimated 19,000 hours and more than 8,600,000 miles. The aircraft, part of the Airbus A320 family, namely one A319-100 aircraft and four A320-200 aircraft, have an average age of less than seven years and are based in the company’s three operational hubs in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Chișinău.

As an operator of regular flights, HiSky has developed a portfolio that includes both domestic destinations (Bucharest – Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest – Timișoara) and 14 international routes, departing from Romania and the Republic of Moldova, from the airports of Bucharest, Cluj, Iași, Baia Mare and Chișinău. The strategy that generated the results reported so far aimed at the development of services addressed to several categories of passengers: business, traveling mainly on domestic routes and to European capitals, vacationers and city breakers, respectively members of the Romanian and Moldovan diaspora. Thus, routes were opened to serve the needs of these passengers and additional facilities and services were introduced for each category, such as a coordinated flight schedule between domestic and international flights, business class, buy on board the aircraft, the possibility of choosing between four economy reservation classes and the “Smart Pass” subscription, addressed to frequent travelers.

Consolidation of the main operator of charter flights position also had an important contribution to the achievement of the development objectives, reported after the first two years of activity. In partnership with the most important travel agencies in the two countries, HiSky operated flights to 62 foreign destinations in Europe, Asia and Africa.

In terms of performance indicators, despite the acute ground staff crisis that has created problems at most airports, only 8% of HiSky-operated flights experienced delays, with an average waiting time of less than 50 minutes.

“We are proud of the numbers we are presenting today, two years after we started operating in two highly competitive markets. More than that, however, we are proud of the culture we have started to build over these years, within the company and in relation to our passengers and commercial partners. We didn’t set out with the goal of replicating the success of other airlines using a fast-track growth recipe, but instead relied on our industry experience to avoid the mistakes that many companies make at the beginning. We have established a sustainable pace of growth and managed to stick to the plan. The honesty and transparency with which we communicated brought us trust, and that is our definition of success, the fact that passengers choose to come back not because they lack options but because they know they can rely on us,” says Iulian Scorpan, CEO of HiSky.

For 2023, HiSky estimates a doubling of the number of passengers transported in 2022, i.e. over 1,300,000. To achieve this target, two new aircraft will be introduced to the company’s fleet in March and April, with strong prospects for a third aircraft in the second half of the year. Thus, the transport capacity for the summer season will increase by almost 50%, i.e. by 421 seats. The two Airbus A321 neo LR aircraft whose delivery is expected in the next period also open up the opportunity to operate new routes, inaccessible until now, due to the extended flight autonomy of up to 7,400 km.

On the occasion of the anniversary of the first two years of activity, HiSky is also running a campaign through which it gives thanks to passengers for their contribution to the company’s success. Thus, passengers traveling on any of the external routes on the 4th or 5th of March will be surprised with a series of gifts during the flight. On the same dates, travel tickets can be booked on the company’s website with a 20 euro discount on each flight segment, using the promo code 2YEARS.

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