Ryanair reopens Cork Airport base and restores 20 routes to UK and Europe

Ryanair’s network for this winter will include Alicante, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Gdansk, Lanzarote, Liverpool, London Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, Malaga, Poznan and Tenerife.

Its summer 2022 network will include Alicante, Birmingham, Bordeaux, Carcassonne, Edinburgh, Faro, Gdansk, Girona, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Liverpool, London Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, Malaga, Mallorca, Milan Bergamo, Poznan, Reims and Tenerife.

The airline, which closed its Cork headquarters last October, said the reopening would secure 60 jobs for Ryanair and create thousands of tourist jobs in the area.

This comes after months of talks between management at Cork Airport and DA and Ryanair that led to a decision to extend a traffic recovery plan at Cork Airport until the end of October 2022 to incentivize Ryanair.

The announcement came at the airport this morning as work continues to rebuild its main runway. The airport is set to reopen to commercial air traffic from November 222.

Plenty of travel options for Cork commuters

Cork Airport’s managing director, Niall McCarthy, said he was pleased with Ryanair’s announcement.

« Twenty routes for sale from Cork Airport on Ryanair’s website will ensure Christmas 2021 and Spring Summer 2022 have plenty of travel options for our passengers, » he said.

« Sunny, city holidays and inbound visitors from the UK and continental Europe are good news for jobs in aviation, tourism and hospitality and the recovery of our economy in 2022. »

Ryanair has now returned traffic to pre-pandemic levels for summer 2022 at Cork, Shannon, Cook and Kerry airports.

But she said the outside was still Dublin Airport, which is set to produce a 35% drop in Ryanair traffic for the summer season unless the government and the Minister for Transport support the DA in extending the current Covid-19 traffic recovery plan to the end of next summer as Cork Airport has done .

Ryanair DAC CEO Eddie Wilson today called on Transport Secretary Eamonn Ryan to urgently confirm an extension of the current daa scheme until October 2022, similar to the scheme at Cork Airport.

« This extension of the Traffic Recovery Scheme will ensure that Ryanair will fully restore its pre-pandemic capacity at Irish airports in preparation for summer 2022, secure Ireland’s tourism industry, and thousands of jobs that depend on air connectivity, » he said. .