Ryanair scraps flights to two airports in Spain and cuts services to several others over ‘excessive fees’

RYANAIR says its cutting flights at seven airports in Spain this summer and blamed ‘excessive fees’ charged by airport operator Aena.

The budget carrier has announced that it will stop services to Jerez and Valladolid, and reduce flights to Vigo, Santiago de Compostela, Zaragoza, Santander and Asturias.

The Irish company said it will reduce capacity on 12 routes by 18% and cancel some 800,000 passenger seats compared with the previous summer.

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Ryanair said it would redeploy its aircraft and capacity in countries such as Italy, Sweden, Croatia, Hungary and Morocco, ‘where governments encourage growth’, it said in a statement..

The airport has complained for several years about the airport fees charged by Aena, despite a freeze during the Covid-19 pandemic and a December decision by the competition watchdog to block an increase planned in 2025.

More than 309 million passengers travelled through Spanish airports in 2024, an all-time high, as the country attracted a record number of foreign tourists.

Last September, Ryanair unveiled a growth plan 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 in 2023.

Company CEO, Eddie Wilson, said at the time: “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).