RYANAIR has announced a €200m investment in Cork Airport and a full recovery of its pre-pandemic passenger capacity with the reopening of its two aircraft base.
This investment will bring 20 routes to Cork, including the introduction of new services to Birmingham and Edinburgh which are unserved following the collapse of Stobart Air. These flights will operate from December.
It will aslo begin flying to Alicante and Malaga in Spain, Poznan and Gdansk in Poland, several London airports and Liverpool for winter.
Cork Airport and the DAA have worked closely with Ryanair over the last number of months, to extend the traffic recovery scheme to the end of October to incentivise Ryanair traffic to return to pre-pandemic levels.
Now the airline has responded by reopening its base and restoring its traffic at Cork in full for next summer. This will also secure 60 Ryanair jobs.
Ryanair has now restored traffic to pre-pandemic levels for summer ’22 in Cork, Shannon, Knock, and Kerry airports. The outlier continues to be Dublin Airport, which is set to have a reduction of 35% in Ryanair traffic for summer ‘22, unless the airline says, ‘the Government and the Minister for Transport support the DAA in extending the current Covid traffic recovery scheme until the end of summer ’22 as Cork Airport has done.’
Conor Healy, Cork Chamber said: ‘This will help to position Cork on the road to economic recovery as the airline facilitates a great deal of business and tourism not only in Cork but throughout the entire southern region. The news means that Cork Airport can begin to build on the momentum and success it was experiencing prior to the pandemic when passenger numbers were reaching record highs and the airport itself was Ireland’s fastest growing airport.’
