Ryanair to Open Base at Manchester Airport

Irish budget carrier Ryanair has confirmed that it will open a base at Manchester Airport this winter. The airline will initially have two Boeing 737-800s stationed at the UK airport but will double this to four aircraft for Summer 2012.

The low-cost carrier will expand its winter network to 17 destinations with links to Alicante, Bergamo, Bremen, Brussels Charleroi, Dublin, Faro, Frankfurt Hahn, Girona, Katowice, Madrid, Malaga, Memmingen, Oslo, Paris Beauvais, Rome, Rzeszow and Tenerife. Additional flights to Beziers, Biarritz, Ibiza, Murcia, Reus, Tallinn, Tours and Valencia will be added for summer 2012.

The Irish budget carrier first launched flights from Manchester in 1994 and in the summer of 2009 offered flights to ten destinations in six countries. However, the failure to agree a new long-term deal with the airport’s executives led it to cancel all but one of its routes; a multiple daily rotation to Dublin. From October 1, 2009 the budget carrier operated just that single route, however, earlier this year it took its first steps back into the market launching new flights in April to Alicante, Faro, Madrid, Palma and Tenerife. At the time its Chief Executive Officer, Michael O’Leary had suggested that it could consider establishing a base at the airport in the future, a prediction that has become a reality in less than six months.

“We have now clearly made up with Manchester Airport,” he joked during a press conference to announce the latest expansion at the facility this week. “It is like any marriage. You have good times and you have bad times, but we are now ready to ‘make babies’ and build our family here.”

Its initial expansion at Manchester has put Ryanair in direct competition with some of the airport’s established operators, notably easyJet, Jet2.com and Monarch Airlines, but the airline has never been afraid to enter markets already occupied. “Our low-fares help attract passengers from our rivals while stimulating traffic,” O’Leary explained.

Its latest network expansion will again see it competing head-to-head with rivals on four routes to Spain (see above table), although it will hold a monopoly position in most of the markets. Further competition will come in the form of charter specialists Thomson Airways and Thomas Cook which also serve three of these destinations as well as Girona. Ryanair will also face indirect competition to the city destinations of Brussels, Frankfurt, Milan, Oslo, Paris and Rome, where foreign rivals offer existing links to Manchester but from alternative airports (the main gateway to the city in each example).

The introduction of a base at Manchester will certainly change the dynamics of the airline market there. Ryanair is currently the seventh largest operator based on current seat capacity, but from this winter it will become a much stronger rival to Monarch Airlines, Flybe, Jet2.com, easyJet and British Airways, which are currently the five largest operators.