After renewing the collective agreements for pilots and cabin crew last year, Vueling is finally preparing its expansion for next 2025. The low-cost airline of International Airlines Group – the conglomerate that also includes British Airways and Iberia – sealed the Last week, a labor agreement was reached with its commanders that unlocked the group’s planned investments. In the presentation of the quarterly results, the incorporation of three new aircraft was already reported, which will arrive accompanied by 200 new additions for next year’s summer season.
The preliminary agreement sealed between the company and the Sepla union includes hiring commitments in the next twelve months beyond improvements in salaries and conditions. Thus, the organization chaired by Carolina Martinoli committed to hiring at least 55 new commanders and 146 co-pilots by the summer of 2025. This is the operator’s first major incorporation program since the pandemic after more than five years with the pilot workforce stagnating at around 1,280 pilots.
In fact, Vueling’s last major job call dates back to autumn 2018, although then the reality was very different: it came from a summer in which complaints had skyrocketed and it boasted a punctuality rate of 65% in August – very impacted by the controllers and staff strikes – compared to the 79% registered in the same month of 2024. There were also 200 pilots, both for their bases in Spain and internationally.
Since then, the number of pilots has hardly changed. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic, the airline had 664 commanders and 606 co-pilots hired – 1,270 in total. The outbreak of the coronavirus did not affect the total number of the group, as it did with the cabin crew, who shrank by almost 200 people. In 2020 there were 1,287 pilots, a figure that has remained practically unchanged until the 1,278 at which the firm closed 2023.
The general workforce did grow, which already exceeds pre-pandemic numbers. If before the coronavirus the low cost It had 4,439 workers, the number fell below 4,000 in 2020 and 2021 to reach 4,605 at the end of 2023. Cabin staff were the ones who suffered the most from the adjustment and benefited from the recovery.
Now, the airline will jump to approximately 1,480 commanders and co-pilots – depending on the exact number of members it has right now. They will be reached in summer. But The agreement with Sepla also contemplates the incorporation of 145 commanders and 85 co-pilots in the next five years in the event that a fleet change is announced.. All of them in Spain.
The new arms will arrive along with three new aircraft, as announced by the CEO of IAG, Luis Gallego, and Martinoli in a press conference held this Friday. Parent and subsidiary plan for the trio of aircraft to be available in April and be based in Barcelona. Its main destination: to reinforce the operator’s already strategic routes by increasing their frequencies, rather than opening new destinations on the map.
“Vueling needed an agreement so that we could include it in the equation that allows us to allocate our capital. Now that we have certainty about its cost forecast, we can be certain about whether the company should be capitalized,” Gallego said.
The company, which had already planned this growth, was awaiting the agreement to complete the improvement. Once achieved, work is being done internally to seal the flight schedule for the summer of 2025 – essentially reinforcing existing routes – with the incorporation of these three units. The organization is thus preparing to grow once it recovers from the pandemic. Although in 2023 it has not yet equaled the number of flights from 2019, it did exceed the volume of passengers for the first time.
An express agreement with the pilots was attempted in the airline’s offices last year to try to have extra capacity for this summer, although it was ultimately not achieved. And it is that Vueling closed the third quarter with just a 0.8% increase in capacity compared to the average 6.9% of the entire group. Iberia scored 15.5% and Level 24%, on the contrary. IAG decided to stop investments until the labor agreement was signed.
This did not prevent the company from increasing its operating profit from 378 million euros to 389 million in the first nine months of the campaign. The operator operates at levels of profitability much higher than those prior to the coronavirus and in 2023, for example, it recorded profits of 316 million compared to 132 million in 2019. At the sales level, it jumped from 2,446 million to 3,189 million in the five-year period. .
Vueling, the king of El Prat
By 2025 it aims to once again gain share in El Prat, its main operations centre, where it accounts for 40% of operations despite the strength of Easyjet and Wizz Air which, although with quotas of less than 5%, are making progress in the installation. If almost 50 million travelers passed through the Catalan airfield last year, 20.5 million chose the low-cost airline. Behind were Ryanair, Lufthansa Group, Easyjet and Air France-KLM.
Until now, the growth of El Prat had always gone hand in hand with low-cost. If Vueling grew in El Prat, the aerodrome took a growth spurt. However, in 2024 the infrastructure has been able to increase its volume of passengers and flights despite the handbrake placed by Vueling.
According to the latest data from Aena, the airport adds around 47 million travelers between January and October. This is 11.1% more than in the same period of the previous year. It should be remembered that the technical limit of the facilities, which was almost reached before the pandemic, is set at 55 million.
In fact, last October was the best in the historical series with almost 5 million users. The airport has registered 31,517 aircraft movements, another historical record, and has moved 16,996 tons of merchandise. Magnitudes that attest to the recovery of air traffic in the main Catalan city but that urge us to address the expansion of the infrastructure.
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