Europe’s largest airline, Irish ultra low-cost carrier (ULCC) Ryanair will reopen its base in Copenhagen from the coming Winter season, it has announced this Tuesday. The airline will station two aircraft in Kastrup airport, starting in mid-December.
The increased presence in the airport will allow for the opening of four new routes, connecting Denmark’s capital to Düsseldorf/Weeze, Faro, Paris/Beauvais and Warsaw/Modlin. Frequencies to Gdańsk and Kraków will also be increased, said the Irish airline in a press release.
Ryanair says it currently carries 2.3 million passengers yearly to and from Copenhagen, and the new base will allow this figure to grow to 3 million a year.
The ULCC is reopening its base in the Danish capital after eight years. In March 2015, it stationed a single 737 in the airport — with plans to grow to four — but in July, following a row with the local unions, it shut both of its bases in the country, in Copenhagen and in Billund.
In 2017, Ryanair started recognizing unions in countries it operated in, and in 2022 it reopened its base in Billund with two aircraft. Ryanair remarked, on Tuesday’s press release, that the creation of 100 jobs in the new Copenhagen base is made under an existing collective agreement with Denmark’s Dansk Metal union.
Although it celebrated the new base, it also complained about the airport charges in Copenhagen, and it put further growth subject on Denmark’s regulator reducing them.
From Copenhagen, Ryanair operates from the “CPH Go” pier, which allows low-cost carriers to benefit from lower charges in exchange for a leaner infrastructure. The pier is shared with easyJet, Transavia and Wizz Air.
Ryanair is currently the third-largest airline in the Danish capital. According to data by Cirium’s Diio Mi application, this quarter it is offering over 646 thousand seats to and from Copenhagen. It follows SAS (3.086 million seats), which also offers long-haul connections, and Norwegian Air Shuttle (1.628 million).
