Irish budget carrier Ryanair has confirmed that it will open its 50th base in April 2012, selecting the Mediterranean island of Cyprus as the location for its latest expansion. It will also significantly increase its activities at Malta International Airport and Girona – Costa Brava Airport as it places a renewed focus on its Mediterranean network.
The airline will position two Boeing 737-800s at Paphos Airport, which serves the country’s third largest city and many leisure resorts in the vicinity of the coastal city. Ryanair already serves Cyprus, a popular tourist destination for European travellers, via the island’s main gateway in Larnaca.
It currently offers eight flights per week to the city during the Winter 2011/2012 schedule from Barcelona Girona, Bologna, Brussels Charleroi and Dusseldorf Weeze. Its new base at Paphos will see the introduction of 14 new routes - Chania, Frankfurt Hahn, Kaunas, Krakow, London, Memmingen, Milan, Oslo, Patras, Pisa, Rome, Stockholm, Thessaloniki and Treviso - with the more than 80 weekly flights delivering around 600,000 passengers, according to the low-cost airline’s forecasts.
“This is a great vote of confidence in the potential of both the airport and our region from Europe's largest airline,” said Alfred Van der Meer, Chief Executive Officer of airport operating company Hermes Airport Group. “This announcement will help create much needed jobs and tourism and shows that Ryanair shares our confidence in the tremendous opportunity for strong market growth at the airport.”
Elsewhere, the low-cost carrier will also expand at its base in Malta with new services to seven destinations. These comprise twice weekly flights Bournemouth, Kaunas, Malmo, Oslo, Turin and Wroclaw and a four times weekly link to London Stansted, bringing weekly flights to the UK capital to seven with the airline’s existing three times weekly route to London Luton.
The Irish budget carrier has followed up this expansion by revealing a major growth at Girona - Costa Brava Airport, a facility that not only serves the popular holiday resorts of Lloret de Mar, l'Estartit and Blanes along the Spanish coast but also acts as an alternative gateway into the country’s second city Barcelona.
Although the low-cost carrier revealed last year that it believed emerging destinations in Central and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia would form the basis of its network growth, the traditional European holiday markets are seeing a lot of additional capacity from the airline during 2012, most notably Palma de Mallorca which was announced as its 49th base in December last year.
Ryanair will more than double capacity at Girona from March 2012, increasing its based fleet from four to nine Boeing 737-800s and opening services on 19 additional routes, some of which have been previously served by the carrier from the Spanish airport. The new destinations comprise Aarhus, Bydgoszcz, Cagliari, Cork, Doncaster Sheffield, Dusseldorf Weeze, Gdansk, Ibiza, Knock, Krakow, Madrid, Malmo, Nador, Perugia, Poitiers, Skelleftea, Stockholm, Thessaloniki and Turku.
The airline already has a significant network at Girona and this expansion will grow this to 59 destinations, many of which are served by aircraft from other bases. In the past year around 3.67 million O&D passengers flew on scheduled services from Girona with Ryanair holding around a 96 per cent share of this traffic. The main passenger flows are on flights to London Stansted, Madrid Barajas, Pisa Galileo Galilei and Frankfurt Hahn, all operated by the Irish carrier.
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