Spanish low-cost carrier Vueling is turning its home base at Barcelona’s El Prat Airport into a fortress as it continues to grow capacity from the facility. The airline, part of the International Consolidated Airline Group (IAG) alongside Spain’s national carrier Iberia and British Airways (BA), is already the largest operator from El Prat but has opened reservations in the past month to add a further 12 routes to its summer 2015 schedule.

WORLD ROUTES 2017 will take place in Barcelona, Catalonia, hosted by Aeroports de Catalunya. It will be held in the hugely impressive International convention centre, Fira De Barcelona between September 23-26, 2017. Read the official release.

Vueling will launch twice weekly flights from Barcelona to Ancona, Brindisi, Belfast City, Faro, Funchal and Trieste, a three times weekly services to Birmingham, open four times weekly links to Basel, Dublin, Moscow Sheremetyevo and Rotterdam and a five times weekly schedule to Geneva. Many of the routes will see frequency growth during the peak summer months.

Since the collapse of Spanair, Vueling has taken on a greater standing in the Spanish market and its links with Iberia and BA through IAG has enabled it to strengthen its operations from Barcelona.

Our analysis of schedule data shows that the carrier has boosted its capacity from Spain’s second city over the past ten years from 112,650 departure seats in 2004 to 8.8 million in 2014. This has seen its share of departure capacity grow from just 0.6 per cent in 2004, when Iberia dominated operations, to a market leading 37.9 per cent in 2014.

The chart, below, shows how Vueling has overtaken Iberia as the prominent carrier from Barcelona – this year it will offer almost 50,000 annual departures (an average of 135 a day) to 135 different points from the Spanish city.

Data provided by