Ryanair, the Ireland-based no-frills airline company, has announced further cuts to its forthcoming flight schedules.
Finland is the latest destination to suffer service reductions from the carrier, as it continues a rationalisation of its routes and flight frequencies.
Flights to Turku, a town southwest of Helsinki, will cease from Stansted Airport for the winter, and flights to Tampere and Lappeenranta are also being cut. Instead of 13 routes to Tampere, which include two from Stansted and Edinburgh in the UK, there will now only be five. None of the Lappeenranta routes involve airports in the UK.
According to a spokesman for Ryanair, when commenting on the suspension of winter flights to Turku, the city is considered a summer destination. Reports also claim that having spent an estimated EUR800,000 on marketing the flights, the city of Lappeenranta is perplexed by the announcement of cuts, with deputy city director, Kari Koriakoski, quoted as saying, ‘this is difficult to understand because the flights have been almost full.’
The reductions in the airline’s Finland flights come in the wake of similar cuts to services to Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, the Canary Islands, Morocco, and Kos and Rhodes in Greece, while only last week the company announced that it was suspending flights to Larnaca in Cyprus.
Reasons have varied for why each individual cut has been implemented, but the airline has heaped much of the blame on to governments, airport authorities and tourism authorities for not having honoured funding agreements, or for not cutting taxes or charges.
