Ryanair will have this winter the largest operation in its history in Lanzarote, with a total of 38 routes, which include seven new connections with Bournemouth, Budapest, Cologne, Memmingen (near Munich), Paris, Frankfurt and Venice.
"It will be the largest winter schedule we have ever done in Lanzarote with almost one million seats," as explained to Ekonomus this Thursday by the airline's spokesperson in Spain, Elena Cabrera from Tenerife, who also clarified that it is "50% more capacity than in the winter of 2019" prior to the pandemic.
However, "reopening the Lanzarote base is not yet on the table," she explains. Although she specifies that "it is a recurring issue and that the commercial team is always looking to see if there are options, but for now it is not going to happen."
Regarding the drop in the value of the pound sterling in recent weeks, Cabrera acknowledges that "it makes everything more expensive for the British," although she is not afraid of a reduction in the number of arrivals to Lanzarote. "We have a very good base of British tourists who come here, and in fact we have increased capacity by 50% compared to the winter of 2019, therefore we do not expect it to decrease but rather increase traffic to Lanzarote."
The owner of the airline, Michael O'Leary, announced in July that cheap flights were over and spoke of price increases of up to 50%. Cabrera has explained that "it will not be that much, it is true that prices will tend to rise due to oil prices, inflation and the reduction of air capacity, but we estimate that there will be an average price increase of ryanair tickets of 2-3% this year and 4-5% next year."
The Ryanair spokesperson has also stated that the company has avoided part of the increase in fuel costs to keep prices down, since "we had already agreed on 80% of our fuel until March 2023" before the price increase.
