It seems I’ve come back to this headline a lot sooner than expected – with Ryanair planning to operate to twenty new destinations from Frankfurt-am-Main in from autumn 2017.
Ryanair Boeing 737-800 taxing at Birmingham Airport – Image, Economy Class and Beyond.
Ryanair is to base seven new aircraft at Frankfurt as its new base, with the introduction of twenty new routes
Here’s the list of where Ryanair will connect Frankfurt to:
- Athens (daily service)
- Barcelona (daily service)
- Brindisi (3 times weekly)
- Catania (4 times weekly)
- Glasgow (daily service)
- Gran Canaria (twice weekly)
- Krakow (daily service)
- Lanzarote (twice weekly)
- Lisbon (daily service)
- London Stansted (twice daily)
- Madrid (daily service)
- Manchester (6 times a week)
- Milan (daily service)
- Pisa (3 times a week)
- Porto (daily service)
- Seville (3 times a week)
- Tenerife (3 times a week)
- Toulouse (4 times a week)
- Valencia (daily service)
- Venice (daily service)
During the summer, the airline will commence its first operations – Alicante, Faro, Malaga, and Palma.
So, what can we make out Ryanair is up to? Well, the intent is to go after business traffic now it seems as Ryanair muscles into the home of Lufthansa with seven planes. There’s also the leisure traffic too mixed in with some services served a few times a week (all the way to Manchester UK which gets six services a week – seems like Manchester isn’t important enough for a daily service. Yet).
Routes are due to go on sale, with a lead in price of… oh you’ve guessed it €9.99. As usual, don’t hang around if you want a cheap fare.
Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary seems happy – stating:
We are pleased to launch our first Frankfurt Main winter schedule with 20 new routes which will deliver over 2.3m customers p.a. and support 1,750 jobs at Frankfurt Airport. Our 7 based aircraft represents an investment of $700m, which further underlines our commitment to growing traffic, tourism and jobs in the Hesse region and we look forward to working closely with Fraport to deliver industry leading efficiencies and further growth at Germany’s biggest airport.
With Wizz Air and Ryanair knocking very loudly on the door of Frankfurt Airport – this puts the dominant operator there into a corner.
That operator? Lufthansa
Lufthansa is slowly being boxed as a big competitor is readying one heck of an assault at its home base. And it has to react to compete with the lower fares that Ryanair can sometimes offer the customer.
And loyalty won’t cut it I suspect. I strongly suspect that the “lower performing” routes are being worked on in a corner, and seeing if a EuroWings operation could be fit for purpose on those routes.
Whilst Lufthansa may be densifying its A320neos to such a tight configuration, they may also be looking at British Airways in the corner of their eye and pondering if it’s time to drop a full service to cut costs.
Any way you cut it – the carrier to watch this time isn’t Ryanair who will happily arrive in and do what it does – it will be Lufthansa and how it reacts as we head towards October.
This is going to be an interesting fight.
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