Ryanair to offer 23 new destinations from Poland in 2025
Irish low-cost airline Ryanair has announced a record summer schedule for 2025, offering in Poland more than 20 million seats for the first time. Ryanair will operate more than 300 routes during the summer, including 23 new destinations, the company officials told a conference.
"As the number one airline in Europe and Poland, Ryanair is proud to achieve this significant milestone, offering more than 20 million seats per year in Poland for the first time in our history," a press release stated.
"This success is underpinned by a record-breaking summer schedule for 2025, in which Ryanair will operate from 13 Polish airports, including six where it bases 44 aircraft (an investment of USD 4.4 billion)," it added.
Ryanair will offer more than 300 destinations, including 23 new summer routes such as Warsaw Chopin - Pisa, Wroclaw - Lamezia, Krakow - Castellón, Poznan - Valencia, Katowice - Dubrovnik and others, driving traffic growth and creating jobs - especially in Krakow and Wroclaw, where it will add three aircraft this summer.
It will also offer new routes to Bydgoszcz, Lublin, Rzeszow and Olsztyn-Mazury.
"Ryanair's record-breaking schedule from Poland in the coming summer season and the increase of the fleet based at Polish airports to 44 aircraft will strengthen our position as the largest carrier in Poland, offering 307 destinations," said Michal Kaczmarzyk, CEO of Buzz (Ryanair Group).
The Buzz CEO added that Ryanair's team in Poland will increase from 2,500 to 2,800 people, thanks to 300 additional jobs for flight and ground crew at operational bases in Krakow, Katowice, Wroclaw and Poznan.
"We're very committed to Poland, we're committed to growth in Poland and our long-term ambition is to get to 100 aircraft based in Poland and 40 million passengers. Now, that's all of course as you know, it's always subject to costs and competitiveness and the market across Europe at the moment is very competitive," Ryanair Chief Commercial Officer Jason McGuinness said.
"This is huge growth in Poland. 20 million seats offered for the first time ever as far as Ryanair is concerned. We're very pleased that we're growing evenly across Poland. That is, each regional airport is basically adding capacity," Kaczmarzyk said.
He pointed out that even though Ryanair is not adding seats at Modlin, but is reducing them, the total offer from Poland is still 5 percent higher year on year.
The Buzz CEO added that Poland will be one of the priority markets for the group over the next decade.
"Ryanair's investments in Poland are not only new routes, of which we will have more than 300 this year, or flights, where we offer about 2,500 flights from and to Poland in a week, but also infrastructure," Kaczmarzyk said.
"We are investing in hangars, we already have four bays in Wrocław. We are investing in the SIM Centre, this is a new project that is absolutely unique, a High Tech project that we are building in Krakow at the moment," he added.
Company representatives said Ryanair will carry more than 18 million passengers from Poland this year.
The group's CCO announced a desire to expand infrastructure in Ukraine once the war is over.
"I know Ukraine will win the war at some point and we're going to rapidly respond to that. That the rebuilding of Ukraine by deploying up to 5 million seats within the first 12 months and up to 10 million seats within the first five years and that's going to take an enormous amount of capacity out of the current Ryanair network to put into Ukraine and that capacity has to come from somewhere," he said.
"I'm doubtful about CPK. We have an airport (...) Radom as far as I can tell, it has about four flights a week. So I'm not entirely sure why then we're spending 10 billion euros on a new airport. To me, one of the reasons Poland is very successful at the moment is it is very balanced regionally. Your regions are very, very strong. I think part of that is that you have a strong regional airport network," he added.
The CEO of Buzz said that currently there are 1.5 to 1.6 million seats for sale at Modlin per year, over a million less than it was.
"At Chopin there were 400 a couple of thousand, there are close to 600 thousand seats for sale. So in principle, this Chopin result has slightly compensated us for the decline we are seeing in Modlin," Kaczmarzyk said.
"We wanted to double capacity at Modlin. We still think that's possible, but ultimately the management team need to reassess where they are at. We are going to continue to grow in Poland. We are going to continue to grow very, very quickly," McGuinness said.
The Buzz Air CEO said the airline wants to resume routes to Israel and Jordan.
"We want to fly there. Well at the moment it looks like things are starting to stabilise in the region. We are keeping our fingers crossed that this truce turns into peace so that we can actually operate there on a permanent basis and we are talking about these two countries of Israel and Jordan," he said.
CCO McGuinness emphasised that the group believes it is going to grow traffic by about 150 percent in the Central and Eastern European region over the next 10 years.
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