Ryanair, an Ireland-based low-fare airline, has announced that it will open nine new routes from Dublin from April 2014, as well as improve frequencies on eight existing routes, which will deliver an additional 700,000 passengers per annum and support 700 new on-site jobs at Dublin Airport.
This new capacity is the final part of the one million passenger growth that Ryanair had planned at the main Irish airports after the Government’s decision to scrap the €3 travel tax from April 2014.
As part of the growth plan at Dublin, Ryanair will deliver nine new routes to Almeria (4 weekly), Bari (4 weekly), Basel (6 weekly), Bucharest (8 weekly), Chania (4 weekly), Comiso (4 weekly), Lisbon (14 weekly), Marrakesh (4 weekly) and Prague (10 weekly). In total 85 Dublin routes will be operational from April 2014.
Additional flights and improved schedules are on the Birmingham (6 to 8 daily), Bristol (4 to 6 daily), Edinburgh (4 to 8 daily), Glasgow (PIK) (4 to 6 daily), London (STN) (16 to 18 daily), Madrid (14 to 18 weekly), Manchester (8 to 10 daily) and Nice (4 to 6 weekly) routes. The plan will increase the schedule from 300 to 400 flights per week.
Over 700,000 new Ryanair passengers p.a. will be added at Dublin; 8.25m in total. The plan will deliver a total of 1,000,000 new customers, creating over 1,000 jobs at Ireland’s airports, it said.
Ryanair also said that it will create over 300 new direct jobs in Ireland in 2014, for pilots, cabin crew, customer service specialists and software developers as part of the airline’s customer service improvement and website development programmes. The 300 new Ryanair jobs will be in addition to the 1,000 indirect jobs that will be created at Dublin, Knock and Shannon airports to cater for the one million passenger growth planned from April 2014.
Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said: ‘Ryanair is pleased to deliver 9 new Europe routes to/from Dublin and over 1m new passengers for Ireland (which will create over 1,000 new jobs at the Irish airports) in direct response to the Government’s welcome initiative to scrap the EUR3 air travel tax from April 2014.
‘We are also proud to confirm that we will create over 300 new direct jobs in Ryanair in Ireland in 2014 to crew our new based aircraft and to help us roll out our very exciting growth plans, which will include significant improvements to the Ryanair.com website and to our industry leading customer service.’
DAA’s (Dublin Airport Authority) Kevin Toland said: ‘Daa is pleased by Ryanair’s decision to accelerate its growth at Dublin Airport in response to the Government’s decision on the air travel tax and the attractive suite of incentives we offer to airlines launching new services or increasing passenger numbers.’
