The Dutch airline Transavia plans to establish a long-term presence at Brussels Airport. It has opened a new crew center there and stationed a fourth aircraft. From now on, it will also employ Belgian staff, and the plan is to expand further the base, which currently employs 150 people.
“Brussels has become a full-fledged fourth home base for us,” says CEO Paul Terstegge, who also notes that Belgium was chosen because it is an attractive market – for example, airline taxes are higher in the Netherlands.
Four new destinations
Transavia Netherlands, the low-cost division of the airline group Air France-KLM, has been operating out of Brussels Airport since 2022, its first international base. In the Netherlands, it has home bases in Amsterdam, Eindhoven, and Rotterdam. The airline started with two aircraft in Brussels, added a third two years later, and is now stationing a fourth.
As a result, the number of destinations will increase from eleven to fifteen next summer, with new destinations, such as Porto starting in mid-December, followed by Heraklion and Thessaloniki, and Ponta Delgada in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores.
This step-by-step approach is paying off: Thanks to the fourth aircraft, Transavia will carry more than 1 million passengers to and from Brussels Airport this year.
Local crew base
All that time, flights were also operated by Dutch crews, who traveled to Brussels by taxi every day – sometimes staying overnight in hotels – an approach that, according to Chief Operating Officer Marloes van Laake, was not particularly efficient or future-proof.
That is why the decision was made to establish a fully operational local crew base at Brussels Airport, where it will become the third passenger airline to be based there, after Brussels Airlines and TUI. After the recruitment of Belgian staff began in fall 2025, the first flight with an all-Belgian crew departed for Alicante at the end of April.
The Transavia base at Brussels Airport now has about 150 employees, all of whom – or at least most people – work under Belgian employment contracts. They use the crew center to start and end their workday, hold pre-flight briefings, and so on. The plan is to continue expanding the base, although there are no concrete plans yet for a fifth aircraft.
Quieter, more fuel-efficient aircraft
Since it arrived in 2022, Transavia has carried nearly 2.5 million passengers to and from Belgium. According to CEO Paul Terstegge, growth opportunities at Dutch airports were limited.
Transavia consists of two entities: Transavia Netherlands and Transavia France, with hubs in Paris-Orly, Lyon, Montpellier, and Nantes. The former carried more than 10 million passengers last year, while the latter carried approximately 16 million. Its fleet consists of 52 aircraft, including 18 Airbus and 34 Boeing planes, which will be replaced by quieter, more fuel-efficient Airbus aircraft by 2031.
It positions itself in the market with lower prices than a network carrier, but with better service, reliability, and connectivity than a pure low-cost carrier such as Ryanair.
