April 27 (SeeNews) - Hungarian low-cost carrier Wizz Air has laid off less than a fifth of its employees in Bulgaria as a result of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis, Andras Rado, corporate communications manager at Wizz Air, said on Monday.
"That's a confidential number but what I can say is that it is less than the average number of redundancies in the company, it's under 20%," Rado said during an online news conference, without elaborating.
The airline has 300 employees based in Bulgaria, according to a presentation e-mailed on Monday.
The company is uncertain on when it will reopen the first flights to Bulgaria's capital Sofia, as this step highly depends on both the Bulgarian and the arrival countries' restrictions imposed over the COVID-19, Rado noted during the news conference.
"We expect the repatriation type of travels and essential work travels at the beginning and then as demand will bring up and as the governments will ease on the restrictions, we hope to see more and more travellers and more and more routes restarted," Rado said.
Wizz Air has cancelled its flights between Sofia and London scheduled for April 25-27 as it failed to receive approval from the Bulgarian authorities for the flights, the airline said over the weekend.
The flights were aimed at helping Bulgarian citizens return from the UK, as well as to allow a large number of passengers in Bulgaria to reach London. Wizz Air will continue talks with local authorities in order to receive approval to carry out repatriation flights, it said over the weekend.