Ryanair is increasing its presence at Cardiff Airport with a new route to Belfast. For the 2023 summer season, which starts in April, it will operate two flights a week between the Welsh Government-owned airport and Belfast International Airport.
The flights will operate on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Emerald Airlines currently operates a five days a week service to Northern Ireland’s other airport, Belfast City Airport, from Cardiff under a franchise deal with Aer Lingus.
That has a capacity of 72 seats with Emerald Airlines increasing frequency on the route to daily from next spring. Ryanair will operate planes with nearly 190 seats on its route. For the summer season both airlines will provide nine Cardiff to Belfast flights a week with a capacity of around 1,700 seats.
Ryanair’s other current routes from Cardiff Airport are to Dublin and Faro. For the summer season its route to Malaga will return. The current Emerald Airline route attracts a mixture of business, family visiting and leisure passengers.
During the summer season Ryanair will have 140,000 seats for sale on its routes out of Cardiff with 26 flight movements a week. It is expected, in line with its Europe-wide operations, to have a load factor of around 85% to 90%.
On its new Cardiff Airport to Belfast International Airport service, Dara Brady of Ryanair said: “We are delighted to be bringing even more choice and value to our Welsh customers with the addition of this new route to Belfast as part of our summer 2023 schedule, offering our Welsh customers even more choice when planning their long-awaited summer holidays. To mark the good news, we’ve launched a limited-time seat sale for early bird customers with fares starting from just £29.99 available now on Ryanair.com.”
Cardiff Airport said it is on track to hit its target of seeing passenger numbers recovered to 50% of pre-Covid levels at the end of its current financial year - to the end of March 2023. That would give an annualised passenger number of around 750,000. . Latest figure from the Civil Aviation Authority show that in October the Rhoose-based airport handled more than 73,000 passenger, with a rolling year figure of just over 810,000.
However the airport lags behind many other UK airports on the pandemic recovery percentage measure.
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