‘Frugal Fun’ Airline LEVEL Will Soon Get its Own Air Operators Certificate, More Than Seven Years After Being Created

It is perhaps the low-cost, long-haul airline that you have never heard of (or at least know very little about), but Fly LEVEL is currently the fastest-growing carrier within Europe’s International Airlines Group (IAG) portfolio of airlines, which includes British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus.

Created in 2017, LEVEL has never achieved the kind of press attention that other transatlantic low-cost carriers, like Norwegian or Norse Atlantic, have garnered, but over the last seven years, the airline has quietly been building its presence from its Barcelona home.

By next year, the airline plans to operate eight Airbus A330 long-haul aircraft, focusing on connecting Barcelona with North and Latin America. LEVEL targets what IAG describes as the ‘frugal fun’ traveler, and its strategy appears to be working.

By last year, LEVEL was contributing nearly half of IAG’s revenue on Latin American routes, and in its most recent results announcement for the nine months to September 2024, it was revealed that LEVEL had the highest passenger load factor amongst IAG airlines – 95.3% compared to the Aer Lingus load factor of 81.6%.

As Barcelona’s first long-haul airline, LEVEL has been able to tap into the city’s growing market with an “elevated low-cost experience.”

Until this point, however, LEVEL hasn’t actually been its own airline. Instead, IAG simply repainted aircraft belonging to Iberia and flew these aircraft under Iberia’s air operator certificate using Iberia pilots and cabin crew.

Not only did that make setting up LEVEL a lot simpler, but it also meant that IAG could quickly wind the airline down if the business model didn’t work out.

As it happens, that isn’t the case at all, and LEVEL is in the final stages of obtaining its own AOC. Once complete, the airline’s flight numbers will start with the ‘LL’ code, and its callsign on the radiowaves will be ‘Dali,’ which is a nod to Salvador Dali and its home hub in Barcelona.

Of course, LEVEL still remains a relatively small part of IAG’s business, carrying around 675,000 passengers in the first nine months of 2024, compared to the nearly 35 million passengers that British Airways carried in the same period.

Nor has it all been plain sailing – in June 2018, LEVEL made an ill-fated attempt at launching short-haul flights out of Vienna as IAG attempted to muscle in on a competitive market that had been disrupted by the liquidation of Austrian carrier Niki.

Still, what seems to be making LEVEL a success as a low-cost, long-haul carrier is that it isn’t attempting to go head-to-head with established full-service carriers out of big European hub airports.

And despite the fact that it can leverage the assets of one of Europe’s biggest airline groups, LEVEL has been quite deliberate in growing slowly and steadily. For now, however, the airline has resisted calls to expand its network East, saying that it will focus on the North American and Latin American markets for the time being at least.