Newcastle Airport gains pole position during Routes Europe

Newcastle, in North East England is among the destination to take advantage of Ryanair’s continued expansion in Central and Eastern Europe, most notably in the Polish market, host country of this year’s Routes Europe forum.

The airport is developing a much closer relationship with the budget carrier and this has brought what was just a single route operation to and from Dublin just over a year or so ago, to an eight destination network, including flights revealed this week to Gdansk, Warsaw Modlin and Wroclaw.

Ryanair has confirmed it will introduce twice weekly operations to all three destinations during the winter 2016/2017 schedule, adding to its previously announced new links to Lanzarote and Tenerife, its newly launched summer link to Malaga and an expanded offering to both Alicante and Dublin.

The new Poland flights will expand its weekly network at Newcastle to more than 30 departures, providing a capacity of around 400,000 seats in the market as it doubles capacity at the regional airport.

“We are delighted to see Ryanair continue to build its presence in the region and the announcement of these exciting new city routes is great news for the North East travelling public,” Chris Sanders, aviation development director, Newcastle Airport told Routesonline while returning from this year’s Routes Europe forum in Kraków, Poland.

“Poland is a vibrant country with a host of attractions on offer and we expect these flights to Gdansk, Warsaw and Wroclaw to be extremely popular. These routes will give Newcastle and the North East easy access to most of Poland,” he added.

Increasing air links between North East England and Poland has been a target for the aviation development team at the airport and these Ryanair flights will complement the existing link of leisure carrier Jet2.com to Kraków. They are expected to be popular with the Polish community in the North East, businesses in both countries as well as short break leisure travellers.

Richard Maslen

Richard Maslen has travelled across the globe to report on developments in the aviation sector as airlines and airports have continued to evolve and…