Ryanair has just announced it intends to slash the number of routes out of Manchester airport. As of October 1 it will be cutting its routes from ten to just one, Dublin, owing to the cost of airport charges.
One possible option for Ryanair is to move the flights from Manchester to another regional airport such as East Midlands, Liverpool or Leeds Bradford. The 44 routes affected by this change would be Barcelona (Girona), Bremen, Brussels (Charleroi), Cagliari, Dusseldorf (Weeze), Frankfurt (Hahn), Marseille, Milan (Bergamo) and Shannon.
Manchester airport has defended its position on not lowering the airport charges saying:
“Not withstanding all of our investment in Manchester Airport including during the current recession, we don’t believe that charges as low as £3 per passenger are unreasonable. Clearly, Ryanair do and that’s regrettable.”
According to Ryanair it offered Manchester an additional 28 flights which would involve an additional 400,000 new passengers and 400 new jobs. This was offer was put on the table with the expectation that Manchester would reduce their charges.
Manchester rejected the charges saying: “We’ve consistently cut our charges for the last 15 years even when faced with increased costs such as security.”