Ryanair Adds a Million Seats to Its Winter Schedule

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DALLAS - From an initial aim of 165 million passengers, Ryanair (FR) now anticipates that its full-year traffic will increase to around 166.5 million this year.

The airline is expanding its winter schedule by nearly a million seats at 20 UK airports, including Stansted (STN), Gatwick (LGW), Manchester (MAN), Birmingham (BHX), Bristol (BRS), Glasgow (GLA), and Edinburgh (EDI), among others.

This month, the Dublin-based ULCC revealed its intentions to add a fourth aircraft and launch 20 new winter routes to expand services at Venice Marco Polo Airport (VCE).

Bucking the current industry trend of reducing flight schedules due to staffing shortages, it then announced that it was adding 500 flights from STN during the October mid-term school holidays. The STN flights give FR an additional 10,000 seats to destinations including Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece.

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary has described the situation at London Heathrow Airport (LHR) as being "hopeless," adding that both his airline and STN have the capacity and employees to handle the increase in passenger numbers.

It's no surprise then that the CEO boasted the increase in capacity come winter while lambasting the competition, “While BA are cancelling 8% of their winter schedule due to staff shortages, Ryanair is now adding more capacity to our largest ever UK winter schedule.”

Featured image: Ryanair 9H-QBM Boeing 737-800. Photo: Julian Schöpfer/Airways