It seems that low-cost carrier Ryanair is preparing to add a lot more capacity to Israel, with the announcement of 15 new routes to the country.
Ryanair Boeing 737-800 in Boeing/Ryanair Colours departing Dublin Airport – Image, Economy Class and Beyond
The carrier will launch 7 routes to Tel Aviv, and 8 to Eilat Ovda in time for the Winter 2017 timetable (and I swear I’ll be talking about the 2018 timetable soon enough)
The break down looks like this – with the frequencies:
Tel Aviv (new destinations):
- Baden Baden (2 weekly)
- Gdansk (2 weekly)
- Krakow (2 weekly)
- Milan Bergamo (4 weekly)
- Paphos (daily)
- Poznan (2 weekly)
- Wroclaw (2 weekly)
Eilat Ovda (new destinations)
- Baden Baden (2 weekly)
- Berlin (2 weekly)
- Brussels Charleroi (2 weekly)
- Frankfurt Hahn (2 weekly)
- Gdansk (2 weekly)
- Milan Bergamo (2 weekly)
- Poznan (2 weekly)
- Warsaw (2 weekly)
So what can we tell from the breakdown? With the majority of the routes twice weekly, this is Ryanair trying to create leisure traffic feed rather than business traffic feed.
Only one of these new service operate daily (Paphos). This will compete with services from Larnaca Airport, which has Aegean Airlines, Arkia, Colbolt Air, Israir Airlines, Tus Air, and Up! (operated by El-Al).
With Israel opening itself to an Open Skies agreement, there has been moves by El-Al to counteract the arrival of the Low Cost Carriers – primarily, this involved the creation of Up!
Low Cost Carriers have been dripping into Israel and Tel Aviv airport with the likes of Easyjet, Vueling, Ryanair (who is adding services to the airport), Up!, Transavia and Air Berlin.
The move by Ryanair is a reasonable sized push – but if the airline wants to establish lines of business traffic and converting some of these new routes to daily operation, there’s a need to re-think some of the routes to locate them to business friendly centres.
How Ryanair will take these new routes forward – and what gets converted into a daily service could be one to watch in the future.
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