Alex Trelinski
RYANAIR unveiled a growth plan on Thursday to invest €3 billion to expand its operations in Spain through to 2030 but threatened it will only happen if airport tax rises are scrapped.
It targeted 77 million passengers in Spain and abroad within six years, as opposed to 58 million passengers last year.
The budget airline is promising 1,000 routes compared to the current 765 and to open five regional bases in Las Palmas. Fuerteventura, Menorca, Reus and Zaragoza.
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But, the Irish carrier insists the growth plan will only happen if airport operator Aena reverses plans to increase airport taxes this year and in 2025.
Ryanair has appealed to Spain’s competition regulator over next year’s 0.5% hike next year.
Company CEO, Eddie Wilson, said. “If there are no changes, the plan will not be carried out. The airline assumes a cost of €600 million in fees, of which 50 million corresponded to the last increase of 4%,”
He complained about the change made by the Spanish government which agreed to freeze taxes after the Covid pandemic ‘at least until 2026’.
Wilson contrasted Spain’s attitude with that of Italy, and said it has led to less investment, fewer routes, fewer flights and less capacity than it should have.
He compared six Spanish and Italian with similar populations, and said passenger seat availability in Italy is six times higher than in Spain (in a comparison between Granada and Bari and Pamplona and Trieste).
The CEO said the differential goes up 13 times if the figures for Murcia and Bologna or Zaragoza and Palermo are compared.
The reversal of Aena’s fees should be accompanied by an effective discount plan to dispose of the underused capacity of regional airports, he added.
“Instead of investing money in the Caribbean or Latin America, it should focus its efforts on applying discounts that allow the company to resume openings at airports in the emptied Spain,” Wilson remarked.
He pointed out that the last regional Ryanair base opening was at Santiago de Compostela in 2016 and nothing has happened since then.
“In those years we have opened dozens of operational bases in destinations that compete directly with Spain, such as Reggio Calabria, Triestre, Dubrovnik or Tangier.”
Elena Cabrera, Ryanair’s general manager in Spain announced a new route schedule from Madrid- the carrier’s central base.
It will launch two new routes to Verona (Italy) and Kaunas (Lithuania), which will add 63 operations and 13 aircraft plus a cumulative investment of €1.1 billion.
All these factors will contribute, according to Cabrera, to increasing Madrid air traffic by around 7%, to exceed seven million Ryanair passengers per year.
