Ryanair Plans New European Flights
Discount airline announces 13 new routes from Sweden
Ryanair's new routes include flights to Baden Baden and Berlin, Germany; Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Basel, Switzerland; and Salzburg, Austria.
Europe’s largest discount airline, Ryanair, has announced that it will launch about a dozen new routes from its hub in Stockholm, Sweden. The new routes include Baden Baden and Berlin, Germany; Salzburg, Austria; Basel, Switzerland; Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Alicante and Valencia, Spain; Liverpool, England; Porto, Portugal; Pisa and Trapani, Italy; Bratislava, Slovokia; and Malta.
The company’s outrageous chief executive, Michael O’Leary announced the new flights dressed as a Viking. Most of the new flights will commence in October, with the Tripani launch in November and Salzburg following in December. By then, Ryanair will have added two new Boeing 737-800 aircraft to its fleet bringing its total to six. The carrier is investing $140 million in the new planes.
“Only Ryanair guarantees the lowest fares from Sweden,” a press release from the carrier said. “If any passenger finds a lower fare with another airline on the same route, Ryanair will refund double the difference. To celebrate these 13 new routes, we are giving away 100,000 seats from Stockholm for just 220 SEK (just the taxes), and we urge all passengers to log onto www.ryanair.com immediately, as seats this cheap will sell out fast.”
With the new routes, Ryanair will fly 28 routes from Skavsta airport. O’Leary said Ryanair is working to double that number in the next few years.
“We are the IKEA of the airline industry, said O’Leary in a direct reference to one of Sweden’s largest and most visible businesses. “We will keep expanding through lower prices all the time.”
The Ryanair chief also mentioned that the company’s growth in Sweden won’t be limited to Skavsta or even Malmö. “We have been talking to four or five additional airports in Sweden,” he said, although he would not reveal the exact airports.
On the subject of transatlantic flights for Ryanair, O’Leary said it is possible that they would set up a “sister company” to fly some transatlantic routes but that they wouldn’t do it useing the Ryanair name.
O’Leary went on to slam rival airline SAS. "Ryanair's low-price flights from Skavsta have been a tremedous success because Swedish passengers can't stand SAS's high prices and frequent strikes," O'Leary said. “We have never had a strike in 20 years because we don't have somebody in the middle telling us lies.”
He went on to speculate that SAS would be devoured by a European airline, such as Lufthansa and that in the next decade the European airline sector would be made up of “four large airline groups:” Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways and Ryanair.
“We will wait maybe until the next big crisis in the airline industry, then buy up a cheap fleet of aircraft,” he said.
Currently, Ryanair has numerous flights throughout Europe including Marseille, Brussels, Frankfurt and Paris.
