Ryanair has confirmed it will open a base at Baden Baden (Karlsruhe) Airport in Germany next year, expanding its network from the city by more than a half. The Irish budget carrier will station two Boeing 737-800s at the facility from March 2012 and introduce new connections to Faro, Malaga, Palma, Riga, Thessaloniki, Vilnius and Zadar. It already offers flights to 12 destinations from the airport with 23 weekly departures to Alicante, Bari, Cagliari, Girona, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, London Stansted, Porto, Rome, Tenerife, Trapani and Stockholm.
The low-cost carrier is already the largest operator from the former military air base, located in Rheinmünster in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, approximately 25 miles south of Karlsruhe, 7.5 miles west of Baden-Baden and 34 miles north of the French city of Strasbourg. 
In the past year it handled around 509,000 O&D passengers on its flights from the airport and expects this figure to rise to around 800,000 once the new routes are introduced. Its most popular routes are its daily link to London Stansted which carried an estimated 128,000 O&D passengers and its three times weekly links to Girona and Rome Ciampino on which it carried 85,000 and 71,000 O&D passengers, respectively.
The airline’s expansion brings a range of new destinations to the airport with only the Palma de Mallorca route served. airberlin currently offers a link from Baden Baden but will terminate this service next month.
This announcement follows less than a week after the Irish budget carrier revealed it is to also open a base in the Polish city of Wroclaw in spring 2012, its first in Poland. The airline will initially station a single Boeing 737-800 at Wroclaw’s Copernicus Airport from March at which time it will boost its network by more than a third with the addition of six new routes.
The low-cost carrier is already the largest carrier at the facility offering links to 15 destinations in Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain and the UK. It currently offers more than 40 flights per week accounting for a 39.8 per cent share of the available weekly seats.
The new additions to its network next year comprise Bournemouth, Chania, Malmo, Malta, Paris Beauvais and Venice Treviso. All but one of these destinations are new for Wroclaw, with Wizz Air already providing a three times weekly link to Paris Beauvais.
In addition to this growth, Ryanair revealed this week that it is considering establishing operations from the new Warsaw Modlin Airport which is due to open next summer. The former military airfield is currently being converted into a civilian facility for use mainly by low-cost carriers.
A spokesman for the airport confirmed to The HUB that the irish carrier “is one is one of a number of carriers that Warsaw Modlin is talking to about serving the airport when it opens in Summer 2012”.
Related Content
