Ryanair has announced a new route to Lithuania for this winter, departing from Belfast International Airport.
The budget airline is launching flights to Kaunas, the second-largest city in the eastern European country.
Dara Brady, director of marketing, said the new route would serve the considerable population of Lithuanian people currently living in Northern Ireland, and is also a destination for Christmas markets and city breaks.
The airline currently has a ‘seat sale’ running with ticket prices starting from £24.99 for trips to Kaunas until the end of January, if booked by October 17.
There are 13 Ryanair routes in total travelling from Belfast over the winter period, including links to Prague, Marrakech and Madeira.
Due to a cap on passengers at Dublin Airport, Ryanair has also added a new capacity of 50,000 seats to Belfast.
It was initially thought these would all be between the Stansted London and Belfast route, but Mr Brady said a lot of the extra seats have been divided between the Alicante and Krakow flights.
There is also a possibility that a Belfast route to Lapland could be in the mix coming up to the festive season.
“There’s a bit of it going into Alicante and Krakow. Alicante is one of the most popular routes from Belfast,” Mr Brady explained.
“As we get closer to the Christmas period, based on demand, we’ve a tendency to add frequencies into routes on certain days.
“That 50,000 will be added into the system as well in terms of some of the ad hocs that you want to see around that Christmas period.
“If we are to look at doing additional ad hoc Lapland flights based on an increase in demand, we won’t be able to do that from Dublin, and somewhere like Belfast could pick up these additional slots.”
Peak times for Lapland visits are around the end of November and beginning of December. Mr Brady noted that it is still too early to tell whether additional flights will be needed for then, but said “if we see pent up demand for it, that’s where we could see opportunities for flights from here [Belfast].
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“But we won’t see that until we see the bookings move along the next couple of weeks.
“If we don’t use the historic slots [from Dublin Airport] we could lose them, but if we have any additional Lapland activity, we would have to look for an alternative, of which Belfast would be one of the obvious candidates.”
He referenced the fact that because of the Dublin cap, even the Leinster rugby team have to travel from Belfast instead of Dublin for their away games.
“Where Dublin will struggle this winter is in typical ad hoc slots, where we would add more capacity around the Christmas period than what would typically be loaded in the schedule. That’s still being finalised.
“Other examples of it is, we fly the Leinster Rugby team on their away flights, and now they have to fly out of Belfast. Not sure how Ulster fans will feel about that, but they have to fly out of somewhere.”
The 2023 summer season saw 16 new Ryanair routes launch from Belfast with two based aircraft flying over 140 flights per week.
Mr Brady said a big stimulant for that was the halving of Air Passenger Duty (APD) which is a UK government tax charged to passengers departing from a UK airport.
It is charged on each traveller and is based on where their journey ends
It was cut from £13 per person for a short-haul flight to £6.50 last year, but from April 2024, increased again to £7.
Mr Brady said that scrapping the tax would allow Ryanair to “deliver ambitious growth” for the UK for the rest of the decade.
“We are again calling on the UK government to reduce APD. We’ve seen the benefits of getting the base aircraft here.
“We’ve added nine domestic routes, when the tax was scrapped – four of them from Belfast.
“Scrapping and lowering costs is the only way to drive tourism and passenger numbers. Increases in APD is bad for Belfast and it will only lead to increased costs which will damage passenger growth.
“It’s very important that Belfast maintains low-cost access to attract airlines like Ryanair.
“We’re the only airline growing by 100 million passengers over the next 10 years, and Belfast will compete for that passenger growth.”
News Catch Up – Wednesday 16 October