Airlines start over 200 new routes this week; Ryanair accounts for one-third of them

Air Force One arrived at London Stansted on Wednesday and gave shy and reclusive Ryanair some helpful live global TV news coverage. An incredible one in every three new routes starting this week are Ryanair’s with a total of 61 airports benefiting from its latest network additions. The new network planner in charge of all this growth is Ken O’Toole, a chartered accountant who joined the airline in 2006. Ken becomes Director of New Route Development in place of Bernard Berger who heads off to join Hyderabad Airport later this month.

As the world’s leaders meet at the G20 summit in London to debate and take action on the world economy the world’s airlines have been busy starting over 200 new services this week. This compares favourably with a year ago when anna.aero also identified over 200 new services. Once again we have produced a handy, downloadable spreadsheet with a summary of the routes being started that can be sorted by airline, airport name, airport code, frequency or even aircraft type.

It’s a happy Easter for Edinburgh with 12 new services. This week’s anna.aero features one of our famous, free, downloadable spreadsheets with details of over 200 new routes that have started this week. Totally impress your colleagues with your up-to-date knowledge of who’s started flying what to where and how often. click here to download.

Europe’s LCC driving new route development

Europe’s LCCs dominate the new route launches this week with Ryanair accounting for one-third of all new routes (67), followed by Cimber Sterling with 10, Wind Jet with nine, Norwegian with seven and easyJet with five. Other European LCCs such as Aer Lingus, Blue Air, bmibaby, clickair, Monarch and MyAir.com were also busy exploring new market opportunities. However, Lufthansa and Lufthansa Italia also both launched five new routes giving Lufthansa a total of 10.

198 airports celebrate new route launches

Mamma mia!! 23 Italian airports had new services (who didn’t??) Lufthansa and Lufthansa Italia launched a total of 10.

All these new routes in Europe was particularly good news for Italian airports. Some 23 Italian airports benefited with Cagliari (16 new routes) and Bologna (15 new routes) keeping their PR departments (and cake-makers) busiest this week. Next busiest were Copenhagen with 13 (and none from Ryanair), Edinburgh (with 12) and Forli (with nine). Other airports with reasons to cheer thanks to seven new routes each were Brussels Charleroi, London Gatwick, London Heathrow and Marseille. In all we identified 198 airports celebrating new route launches during the last seven days.

Some routes swop airlines, some airlines swop airports

This week’s 200+ compares favourably with a year ago when anna.aero also identified over 200 new services.

The week’s busiest new route is clickair’s new five times daily service between Barcelona and Paris Orly – a route which has been ‘handed over’ by Iberia and easyJet to make way for both clickair’s and a new Air France service. Likewise Swiss’ new four-times daily Zurich to Lyon route can be attributed in part to the decision by Air France to vacate the service at the end of the winter period.

Other ‘new’ routes are as a result of a change of airport. British Airways’ two new Heathrow routes have both been transferred over from London Gatwick, while Air France has moved its Southampton service from Paris CDG to Paris Orly. Air Canada’s Vancouver to Newark service previously operated to New York JFK. Bmi Regional’s new Birmingham to Abderdeen route actually replaces a bmibaby service.

Airlines rediscover discarded routes

Some ‘new’ routes are also re-starts after a significant absence. Aer Lingus returns to the controversially-dropped Shannon-London Heathrow route after a couple of years while easyJet re-starts London Gatwick to Zurich flights after a five year hiatus (prompted by the imminent arrival of Aer Lingus on the route, part of a major push it is rolling out of Gatwick). The clear winner in this category though is KLM which returns to the Amsterdam-Liverpool route after a gap of over 70 years having previously operated between 1934-39. On its website the airline claims to be “the first major airline to take you to Amsterdam from Liverpool” which may come as a surprise to easyJet which has been operating an Amsterdam service since October 1997 and last year carried 44.6 million passengers systemwide compared to KLM’s 23.8 million.

Danni Minogue at Melbourne’s just-renamed Etihad Stadium celebrates the launch of Abu Dhabi services in a glittering weekend for the city which also saw the start of the F1 season.

Several planned routes delayed or abandoned

Initially we had been anticipating over 220 new routes starting this week but on closer inspection a number that had been announced have either been delayed, abandoned or turned out to be seasonal routes that were re-starting for summer (and are thus not included in our analysis). These include British Airways’ new routes to Saudi Arabia which have been pushed back to the end of May, Austrian’s planned Aleppo service which has been shelved for now, and Air France’s London Heathrow to New York JFK route which just appears not to have been introduced after all.

64 airlines entering new markets

So while we found a total of 64 airlines starting new routes, there are probably some new services that have escaped our attention. If we missed one started by your airline, or operating at your airport please let us know at ralph.anker@anna.aero.

The new Erevan service to Zurich is greeted in the traditional way: For more route launch pictures and analysis see this week’s highly-illustrated new route section.