The airport of Alicante-Elche opens the Costa Blanca to ten new air routes by the hand of the low cost lines
The companies predict that new flights for this season could move about one million new passengers during this year - Ryanair incorporates routes to Fez, Turin and Warsaw
After a January in which the Alicante-Elche airport has broken records and a closure of 2022 in which pre-pandemic levels were recovered, the Costa Blanca will open ten new air routes during this year hand in hand with low-cost lines. New routes that could bring movements close to one million passengers to the terminal. At the moment, the airport is connected to 24 countries and more than a hundred cities around the world. Once normality is recovering, all forecasts suggest that this year could achieve the best results in many years, after a period marked by health restrictions.
The low-cost flight company Ryanair plans to go from the four million travelers who arrived at the airport hand in hand with its planes to a total of 4.7 million with the incorporation of these new flights, plus the reinforcement of others that are already operating. At the moment, low-cost lines are the ones that are contributing the largest number of travelers to the airport. In the next three months, between February and April, the terminal has an air capacity for 1.83 million passengers, of which 1.63 million correspond precisely to low-cost flight seats.
In total, the company will have eighty routes from the airport, according to the data provided by the company. Among these new routes are Belfast, Fez and Rome with a weekly frequency of three flights; Frankfurt, Klagenfurt, Lodz, Paderborn, Santander and Turin, with two flights a week; and finally, Warsaw, with four flights. A program that reinforces connections with Germany and Italy, highlighting routes with other markets such as Morocco, Poland and Ireland. The new destinations are Fez, Klagenfurt, Lodz, Paderborn, Turin and Santander, the rest recover from previous years. In the same way, frequencies will be reinforced on more than thirty of the routes that the low-cost company already has in operation, among which areBordeaux, London, Milan, Porto and Bologna.
The company, which last year celebrated fifteen years of activity in the province of Alicante, said that it is its largest flight schedule for Alicante, in a year for which forecasts point to the recovery of tourism and overcome the falls registered during the years of the pandemic. The country manager of Ryanair for Spain and Portugal Elena Cabrera said that with these new reinforcements "citizens and visitors of Alicante are offered even more options for their summer holidays". In total, the increaseover the summer of the previous year is expected to be 19 percent.
Ryanair incorporates two new aircraft
For the coverage of all these new routes, two new aircraft are incorporated, with which the company will have a total of thirteen aircraft based in this terminal, which has involved theinvestment of 200 million dollars. The company anticipates that these reinforcements will generate more than 60 direct jobs for pilots and cabin crew. Although with the reinforcements of flights, the overall investment amounts to 1,300 million in investment and 5,100 jobs, of which 390 direct. The company stressed that, of this fleet of aircraft, four of them are so-called "gamechangers", which have the characteristic of having a volume of CO2 emissions and noise and a capacity in passenger transport of four percent above that of other aircraft. The company wants to make clear the message that air travel is not necessarily at odds with sustainability or the environment.
To celebrate the record schedule, Ryanair has launched a special offer of seats with fares from 29.99 euros for travel between April and October 2023 and that must be booked before midnight on February 17 on the website of its company, www.ryanair.com.
Movement at Alicante-Elche airport
The Alicante-Elche airport closed the year 2022 with a total of 13.3 million passengers, a figure that represents the recovery of 87.7 percent of the traffic that was reached in 2019, the year in which the terminal broke the record of achieving fifteen million passengers, the highest figure in its history. Everything indicates that this year that now begins will exceed all these marks, since the month of January has already been a record and the levels prior to the arrival of the pandemic have been recovered. A total of 795,148 passengers passed through the Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernández airport during the month of January. The figure represents 1.3% of the data for the same month of 2019, that is, a year before the start of the pandemic, and registering the best month of January in its history, with an increase in traffic of 68.1% compared to January last year, according to data provided by Aena.
Of the 1.8 million tourists who could arrive by plane to the province of Alicante during the next three months, a total of 625,630 are of British nationality, the main market for the Costa Blanca. According to the latest study by Invat-Tur, Tourism Intelligence of Turisme, school holidays during this term are causing an increase in internet searches to come to the Costa Blanca. In the whole of the Valencian Community, the number of places allocated to the United Kingdom exceeds 800,000. Good weather and sunshine are some of the most used terms for those who try to plan their holidays through the internet. The Invat-Turhighlights that 31% of these searches come from the international market even if it is in the middle of the low season. The months of January and February are not characterized by being the ones with the highest number of tourist influx.