Norwegian muscles in on Danish domestic market

Norwegian (DY, Oslo Gardermoen) will launch a Danish domestic seasonal route between Copenhagen Kastrup and Rønne on the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, with the first flight scheduled for the evening of June 15, 2022, it announced on its website. It will compete with DAT (DX, Kolding) on the route.

Catering to the long weekend market with a 3x weekly service, which will wrap up on August 14, Norwegian will deploy one of its B737-800s.

The ch-aviation capacities module shows that the resurgent carrier already operates one Danish domestic route, between the capital and Aalborg, 40x weekly, through its Norwegian Air Sweden AOC (D8, Stockholm Arlanda) subsidiary. It is one of ten routes the Swedish unit currently operates from Copenhagen to points in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe – to expand to as many as 53 routes by the summer. From Aalborg, it will add Palma de Mallorca from April, 2x weekly.

“With the launch of the route between Copenhagen and Bornholm, Norwegian is following its business plan, which has further focus on domestic routes and the intra-Scandinavian routes. Norwegian currently flies between Copenhagen and Aalborg on the Danish domestic network in addition to a large number of direct international destinations from both Copenhagen and Aalborg,” the airline said in its statement on February 15.

Magnus Thome Maursund, Norwegian’s executive vice president for network and pricing, elaborated: “We have said that we wanted to expand our presence on domestic traffic in Denmark. With one exception, the domestic routes in Denmark are characterised by poor competition, and this is to the detriment of customers.”

The launch of the Bornholm route coincides with Folkemødet 2022 (People’s Meeting), a political and music event which in pre-Covid times attracted around 60,000 participants. The airline said it would lay on additional frequencies during the June 16-19 event.

DAT is the only airline currently serving Rønne, linking it with Copenhagen 41x weekly. On January 2, it terminated two other Danish domestic routes to the island, from Aalborg and Billund, ch-aviation schedule analysis revealed, and last July it withdrew a previously announced route to Rønne from Berlin Brandenburg Int’l.