Bremen is made Ryanair’s 17th base

Ryanair will make Bremen their 17th European base airport. They will base two aircraft there from April 2007, and will launch nine new routes. The new routes will include flights to London (Stansted), Girona, Murcia, Tampere, Riga, Verona (Villafranca), Venice (Treviso), Pisa and Oslo (Torp).

Major expansion at Dublin for Ryanair

Ryanair will launch 12 new routes from their Dublin base over the coming months, bringing the total number of routes their operate from Dublin to 63. The new routes include flights to Madrid, Vitoria and Seville (Spain), Oslo (Torp) (Norway), Tampere (Finland), Billund (Denmark), Rzeszow (Poland), Friedrichshafen (Germany), Grenoble (France), Bologna (Forli) (Italy) and Pula (Croatia).

Ryanair announces major expansion at Liverpool

Liverpool and nearby Manchester continue to grow as hubs for low-cost flying. Today, Ryanair has announced 11 new routes for Liverpool.

The new routes, which span Europe, will begin from the beginning of October 2006.

They include Aberdeen and Inverness in the UK, the Spanish cities of Santander and Santiago de Compostela, expansion into Poland with flights to Wroclaw, Poznan and Krakow. They will begin flying to the Italian cities of Alghero (Sardinia) and Ancona, and also to Kaunas in Lithuania and Tampere in Finland.

Ryanair to launch second Finnish base?

Ryanair announced that they are looking for a second base in Finland. They currently operate flights to Tampere.

Finland has been a rocky country for low-cost flying in the past, with carrier Flying Finn disappearing in 2004, and many routes coming and going. This looks set to change with the expansion of Sterling and addition of Air Berlin flights to Helsinki.

Ryanair adds routes from Stansted

As expected, Ryanair today announced details of their new routes from London (Stansted). This includes a route to Kaunas, their first Lithuanian route, and the first low-cost connection from outside Scandinavia to Lithuania. Flights will commence on 22 September 2005.

They will also launch 3 new routes to Lodz in Poland (another new Ryanair destination, and a new destination for the European budget route map), Poznan and Grenoble.

Ryanair also announced that they would be increasing frequencies on their routes from Stansted to Derry, Seville, Granada, Riga and Tampere.

Ryanair becomes the first budget airline to fly to Latvia

Many people have been waiting for Ryanair to announce new routes further east into Europe after an initial early promise to do so by the airline. Today, Ryanair have done just that by announcing new routes to Riga, making them the first budget airline to fly to the recent EU-addition, Latvia, and the first budget airline to fly from the UK to any of the Baltic states.

Ryanair will begin flights to Riga on 31 October from London (Stansted), Frankfurt (Hahn) and Tampere.

In addition, Ryanair have added 2 further destinations to the budget-flying map, Santander and Zaragoza in Spain. They will fly to Zaragoza from London (Stansted) (beginning 01 December 2004) and to Santander from London (Stansted), Rome (Ciampino) and Frankfurt (Hahn) (beginning 20 September 2004).