Gheorghe Racaru (General Director of Blue Air)

Blue Air is a young company. How is your evolution since your creation?

Our first destinations from Bucharest were Timisoara, Milan, Barcelona and Lyon. We now offer 18 destinations, in Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, France, Turkey and Portugal. For some of them, we also start from the Romanian cities Bacau, Arad and Cluj-Napoca.
We had 55 employees at the beginning, and now over 240. In 2005, we carried more than 240,000 passengers and a little more than 443,000 in 2006. Our turnover exceeded 24,000,000 Euros in 2005 and 47,000,000 Euros in 2006. For 2007, we expect 80,000,000 Euros, and over 800,000 passengers. All our destinations, including the new ones, have a good load factor. For 2006, our total load factor was 77%.

Romania has a fast-growing economy and a strong Diaspora, but it still has weak wages, a small penetration of credit cards… How do you adapt your model to this reality?

We offer our clients a large number of possibilities to purchase tickets: Blue Air tickets can be bought not only online or through our call-centres with a credit card, but also in cash from our ticketing agencies and over 2000 tourism agencies, in Romania and abroad. For our Romanian clients, we also offer the possibility to book the tickets and pay them at the bank.

Romania has entered the EU in 2007. How does Blue Air react to the growing amount of European low-cost airlines flying to Romania? Will your company be able to compete?

The entrance of Romania in the EU has opened the sky for everyone. This competition will ultimately increase the quality of service and lower the prices.

Since October, you are operating internal flights in Romania, challenging the national company Tarom. Do you plan to develop this strategy?

At the moment, we do not intend to introduce other domestic flights. We are focusing on strengthening our current destinations and open new international routes. In 2007, we intend to introduce flights to Stuttgart, London, Zurich, Greece and Cyprus.

Will small companies like yours be able to survive on the low-cost market in Europe?

It will depend on the markets they are operating on, and how smart they will be to take advantage of market potentials. My own point of view is that, in the near future, we will see a kind of consolidation on LCCs operations, most probably on the regional level.