Ryanair is urging potential airport partners to follow the example of Bristol if they want to see significant revenue increases.
Addressing delegates this afternoon (18 September) at the World Low Cost Airlines Congress in London, Ryanair chief operating officer, Michael Cawley, hailed the south west airport as an ideal model.
The Irish carrier will start operating from Bristol in November and is to invest $140m in two new Boeing 737-800 aircraft, aiming to serve 16 routes carrying 2m passengers by 2009 to and from the airport.
”What Bristol has done is a lesson,” said Cawley, adding: ”They have some of the smallest square meterage of any airport that we operate to, but have maximised efficiency with 25min turnarounds.”
”Airports are replete with huge, fixed costs and growth is the way to deal with them. Many airports are not producing a level of service that we would like.”
Airports are one of Ryanair”s causes celebres, with the airline famously locking horns with several, from everything such as landing charges to ground operations. And the carrier says the benefits multiply as soon as it brings passengers ”everywhere from Ayrshire to the Dordogne to Galicia, from Knock to Inverness.”
In a classically optimistic address, Cawley mischievously hailed Ryanair as ”The world”s favourite airline,” clearly using the British Airways” slogan in a bid to highlight the number of passengers he hopes to carry ” 50m by the end of this year.
And he had some thoughts on Open Skies, that he believed would aid carriers such as Ryanair. ”With Open Skies, we are going to have big hubs and more and more activity at those hubs will be concentrated on long haul traffic, particularly to the US,” he said.
”It”s insane that British Midland is flying from Heathrow to Stuttgart [for example] ” I think they will use more and more of their slots to operate long haul ” whoever owns them at that point.
”Competition will therefore no longer exist for low-cost carriers on short-haul."