Irish low-cost airline Ryanair will launch three new routes from Romania’s capital Bucharest to Rome, Milano, and Bologna, the company announced on Wednesday, April 1.

Ryanair thus takes on Hungarian Wizz Air and Romanian Blue Air, the top two low-cost airlines operating in Romania, which have been very active on routes to Italy.

“By offering seven routes in the 2015 winter, Ryanair will add 415,000 clients in Bucharest, thus reaching 700,000 clients and doubling its traffic from Bucharest. On a full year basis, this means some 850,000 clients,” said David O’Brien, Ryanair’s commercial director. He added that the company's aim was to become one of the top 3 air carriers in the local market.

Ryanair will make the new routes available starting November 2015. To raise the awareness of these new routes, Ryanair launched a promotional offer selling 3,000 tickets for EUR 6.5 (one way) for these destinations.

This is one of the most aggressive moves on the local market and is only comparable to Blue Air’s sale of EUR 1 tickets, in 2008. However, Blue Air’s EUR 1 prices at that time didn’t include airport taxes.

The offer is part of Ryanair’s strategy to position itself as the carrier with the lowest fares in Europe and Romania as well. In the past year, Ryanair managed to get a quarter of the total passengers from Bucharest to London and remained the only carrier flying from Bucharest to Dublin, due to lower prices. Romanian state-owned airline Tarom withdrew from the Dublin route.

The Irish airline currently sells tickets from Bucharest to London for as low as EUR 20 and tickets to Brussels for EUR 15. Ryanair also has flights from Bucharest to Dublin and Madrid.

“We are so confident that we have the lowest prices that we will have a new tool on our website that will allow customers to compare our prices to those of our competitors on any route. If they find better prices elsewhere and they notify us, we will cut our prices accordingly,” O’Brien said.

With the new routes, Ryanair will have 57 return flights from Bucharest each week, of which 14 to London (2 each day) and 14 to Rome. Flights to Milano, Brussels and Madrid are daily while flights to Bologna are 5 each week, and those to Dublin are 4 a week.

Although it plans to reach the top of the local market, Ryanair has no plans to open a base in Bucharest in the near future or to launch new routes this year. A base would require the company to have one or more airplanes stationed in Bucharest. A local base would also allow Ryanair to open new routes from Bucharest to other cities in Europe where it doesn’t have bases, which would be so called smaller routes.

“The airport in Bucharest is too expensive and this is why we have no plans to open a base here. We will think about it when they will have a proper incentive scheme,” O’Brien explained.

He said that the airport fees in Bucharest are higher than in Copenhagen and that the high costs, as well as the structure (75% of the costs come from the number of passengers handled and 25% from airplane movements) are holding back the local air traffic growth.

“Bucharest has 2 million residents and its airport has 8 million passengers each year, fewer than the secondary airport in Brussels, Charleroi. For comparison, Dublin, a city of one million, has 22 million passengers a year. This shows that something isn't right,” according to Ryanair’s official.

The Irish company operates more than 1,600 daily flights from 72 bases, connecting 189 destinations in 30 countries. Ryanair plans to double its number of clients to over 160 million, by 2024.

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Romania’s Blue Air hopes for 1.6 mln passengers in 2015

Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com