Irish budget carrier, Ryanair, expects to double its passenger traffic from Cologne/Bonn Airport from the winter 2015/2016 schedules after revealing seven new routes from the German facility, including a four times daily domestic service to the country’s capital, as part of its establishment of an operational base in Berlin.

The low-cost carrier will increase its Cologne-based fleet from a single Boeing 737-800 to three aircraft from the start of the winter 2015/2016 schedules in late October. The seven new routes and additional frequencies on existing services will bring its network to 129 weekly flights to 17 destinations and will deliver around two million passengers per annum to the airport.

Germany is a significant growth market for Ryanair and it will continue to connect key German cities with Europe’s major centres of business, with new Cologne routes to Berlin, Copenhagen (daily), Milan (2x daily) and Warsaw (daily), and extra flights to and from London (14 to 17 weekly) and Rome (one to two daily).

Alongside these routes, which support its strategy of focussing more on business demand, Ryanair will also introduce a four times weekly link to Porto, three times weekly service to Valencia and weekly flight to Gran Canaria. Capacity to Palma and Tenerife will also rise from three to four weekly and two to three weekly, respectively.

In our analysis, below, we look in more detail at Ryanair’s network capacity from Germany over the past ten years. After growing between 2005 and 2010 the airline has scaled-back its activities in the country over the subsequent years. This announcement and the launch of the Berlin base will see the market return to growth. Ryanair arrived in the Cologne market in 2012 and has seen annual year-on-year growth in each of the two subsequent years with departure capacity rising 24.2 per cent in 2014.