Europe’s biggest budget airline Ryanair says it is considering cutting more flights from small and medium-sized airports in Spain this winter and in 2026 if Spanish airport operator Aena does not reduce its fees.
In a conversation with elEconomista.es, the airline's CEO, Eddie Wilson, warned: "Regions need low fares to stimulate growth, and they must be accompanied by low costs, because otherwise the formula doesn't work…. It doesn't make sense to continue investing in loss-making operations.
"The rational decision is to move traffic to where access costs are falling, not rising, so we will continue to do so gradually. We have no plans to invest in regional airports because their pricing structure is broken".
In January, Ryanair had already announced it would reduce flights at seven regional airports in Spain during the summer, cancelling approximately 800,000 seats compared to the previous year.
Wilson has criticised the lack of response from the airport operator and the government since their warnings began. “They're not interested in talking. We've been dealing with this issue for years, and all they've been announcing are incentive plans that don't work,” he explained.
The Irish airline states that it is not asking for subsidies, but rather a framework that allows for reducing average costs per passenger. “If we carry more travellers, costs should go down. Everyone wins: Aena recovers its investment, we create jobs, and the infrastructure is used,” Wilson said.
This new warning from Ryanair reinforces the pressure it has put the Spanish government and Aena under since the beginning of the year, when it announced the closure of its bases in Jerez and Valladolid, and route cuts at airports such as Santiago de Compostela, Asturias, Cantabria, and Zaragoza. According to Wilson regional airports are 70 percent underutilised.
But Ryanair is not cutting its routes throughout the country. On the contrary, the airline added 1.5 million seats to larger and more popular airports such as Madrid, Málaga, and Alicante.
At the same time, the company is calling for more predictability to ensure medium- and long-term operations at smaller airports. "What we're asking them is to share some of the risk with us. We don't want low fees forever, but if they give us a discount for three or four years on certain routes, we'll show them it works, and then they can raise them,” Wilson added.
This is bad news for Spain and its residents, partly because many areas have been fighting overtourism, which fuelled dozens of anti-tourism protests last year, and on the other hand the less populated and less 'popular' parts of the country are already struggling with travel links.
If Ryanair were to live up to its word as it already has done this year, such a decision to slash more routes to smaller airports will only contribute further to what Wilson called their "chronic decay".
The Spanish government and Spanish Tourism Board are trying to create more sustainable tourism models, which include “equitable distribution of benefits and burdens” and are trying to promote regions and areas, which receive fewer tourists.
This means promoting smaller areas in the northern, central and western areas of the country in order to spread visitors out, but with fewer connections to these areas, this is going to be much harder.
The fact that Ryanair feels it is being allegedly forced to cut its routes to these smaller, lesser-visited areas and is increasing them to already over-saturated areas is only going to fuel the issue of mass tourism in Spain.
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