Ryanair to start base in Annecy

[willywick]

A very reliable person working in Annecy airport management and chamber of commerce has told me that the new ryanair base will be announced this coming week (probably thursday or friday).

Ryanair will apparently base 3 aircraft in Annecy, located about 50km south from Geneva (marketed as Geneva South). The charleroi and strasbourg cases have made subsidies hard, but ryanair will get free landing rights and the airport will look after marketing for the first year.

Routes are likely to be:

London Stansted (3x daily)
Dublin (1x daily)
Frankfurt Hahn (2x daily)
Rome Ciampino (2x daily)
Pisa (1x daily)
Oslo (1x daily)
Eindhoven (1x daily)
Barcelona Girona (1x daily)

By going to Annecy, ryanair are trying to bite some of the market shares which easyjet has in Geneva, though the routes are pretty much radically different except for London and Barcelona.

Cheers

[flysr4ever]

Something to that effect was apparently (have not seen it myself) published in a recent Dauphiné Libéré (Haute Savoie regional newspaper). Funds have apparently been secured for runway and terminal extention too.

[willywick]

The runway right now is about 1630m long, funds are on the way to increase the runway 650m longer, making it about 2300m long. This construction is planned to start in the next 45 days pending approval of the mayor.

Also one of the major factors which is making the airport more interesting is a new motorway which is planned to open in the next 5 years which will make geneva only 30km away.

From what I have heard, FR ops should largely increase during the winter especially for flights ex-UK.

[lowfaresbuster]

would be very suprised of MOL broke his Moratorium on new routes ex DUB, although last weeks MJV suprised me, this was more as a warning to flyjetgreen, rather than making friends with Aer Rianta (Irish Airport Management).
BTW flyjetgreen had adverts in todays Sunday Independent looking for cabin crew.