Katowice has come and gone more than once. Ryanair did it from 2007-2009 and again from 2011-2014. After that Wizz Air took it on.
Ryanair has operated a lot of Polish routes and at the time the pandemic stuck operated Warsaw Modlin, Gdansk, Poznan, Rzeszow, Wroclaw and Krakow (the latter against easyJet). There must be something about Katowice although Ryanair have tried three other Police routes at BRS over the years that no longer operate: Bydgoszez, Lodz and Szczecin (Stettin).
In the last four years (going backwards from 2019) the total passenger numbers on the Katowice route were 50,574, 42,941, 41,759, 42,789, so a near 18% rise in 2019 over 2018, possibly partly due to an A 321 being introduced (I'm not sure when the larger aircraft began).
When Wizz was operating from BRS to Warsaw Chopin (against Ryanair's Warsaw Modlin), Sofia, Katowice and Kosice (Slovakia) the load factors in the main summer months were in the 90s% (even on the Kosice some months - Wizz only flies one route from Kosice these days, to Luton; it used to have a decent net work around Europe from there).
With load load factors showing a market (they would obviously have to find a satisfactory yield) it was perhaps strange that Wizz Air axed Warsaw Chopin and Sofia, given that Ryanair's BRS routes to eastern and central Europe have been operating for many years, with a small number of failures as instanced earlier in this post.
With Wizz expanding rapidly and now into sun routes and some western Europe city routes from the likes of Luton it might be that a one-route airport doesn't match their future plans and, with BRS well served by easyJet and Ryanair, the opportunity for them to set up a more wide-ranging programme at the airport would be limited, especially with the planning doubts existing over BRS's capacity to handle more than 10 mppa.
If Katowice has been axed Wizz Air would obviously have a good reason for doing so. Another reason might be poor forward bookings in the light of the pandemic.
