Vueling seeks bigger share of business travel market

BERLIN, March 10 (Reuters) - Low-cost carrier Vueling aims to increase its business customers this year, an executive told Reuters on Thursday, another example of a budget airline seeking a slice of the higher-margin corporate travel market.

"We're currently at 30 percent business, 70 percent leisure, but we believe this year it will be 35-40 percent in corporate traffic," Vueling Chief Commercial Officer David Garcia Blancas told Reuters in an interview at the ITB travel fair in Berlin.

Spain's Vueling is part of IAG, the parent group of British Airways and Iberia. Garcia Blancas said that gave Vueling an advantage over other budget rivals in terms of corporate traffic because it can benefit from code share agreements with the IAG airlines.

But he said that Vueling had no plans to follow Europe's biggest low-cost carrier Ryanair, which on Wednesday said it was launching a private jet service as part of a drive for more corporate custom.

Garcia Blancas also said he wanted to work on Vueling's frequent flyer programme, which is currently focused on Spain and Italy, plus roll out an incentive programme for small and medium businesses.

Vueling is currently benefiting from increased demand for travel to Spain, seen as safe by holiday makers after attacks in other popular holiday destinations such as Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, and the carrier has added more capacity to Spanish destinations on routes from Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland as a result.

"One of the challenges is that we have the capacity in terms of planes, but there are no hotel rooms free," he said.

Overall, Vueling which expects passengers numbers to rise to 28 million this year from 24 million in 2015, plans to grow capacity by 18 percent this summer. (Reporting by Victoria Bryan and Peter Maushagen. Editing by Jane Merriman)