The Ryanair airline company (Ireland), which is one of the largest low-cost carriers in Europe, has received permission to operate flights from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Dublin. The lenta.ru website reported this, citing the 1prime.ru website.
Ryanair is expected to begin regular flights on these routes at the end of March 2014.
According to Oleg Panteleyev, the head of the analytical department at the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya), market practice has shown that arrival of a new low-cost airline company on the market will result in an increase in passenger traffic to nearby destinations by approximately 35%, and the effect may be greater, considering the aggressive behavior of Ryanair. Thus, the carrier may pick up some of the passengers that currently fly through Helsinki.
In May this year, Ryanair complained that it had still not received permission to fly to Russia because of bureaucratic obstacles. Ryanair announced its desire to operate flights from St. Petersburg to Dublin back in 2012.
Ryanair flies to more than 1,600 destinations in 29 countries. The airline company has a fleet of about 300 Boeing 737-800 airplanes. Nearly 80 million passengers used the services of the airline company last year.
The low-cost airline companies that have so far managed to enter the Russian market are easyJet (operates on the London-Moscow and Moscow-Manchester routes), Germanwings (Cologne-Moscow and Moscow-Stuttgart), NIKI (Moscow-Vienna), Pegasus Airlines (Moscow-Istanbul), Vueling (Moscow-Malaga, Alicante, and Barcelona), and Wizz Air (Moscow-Budapest).
