Where does the idea come from that BRS is full up? As yeo valley points out, the departure of flybmi has freed up some overnight stands and anyway two more new ones are in the process of completion for the main summer months, to go with four other new ones built on recent years. The airport is currently asking the local authority for permission to incease its annual passenger limit from 10 mppa to 12 mppa which is expected to be reached by the mid 2020s, with up to 20 mppa planned by the 2040s.
I don't know what Ryanair means if they said BRS is full. The airline has still scheduled eight additional weekly rotations in the main summer months this year compared with last summer, and they could also schedule further flights from other bases to arrive and depart at non-peak times if they really felt BRS was full. Furthermore, Ryanair's BRS winter programme has increased by over 60% in the past four winters to 25 winter routes and 90 weekly winter rotations.
I've gone into some detail about BRS because it suggests that Ryanair's decison to spread to the likes of EXT and CWL is a commercial one rather than operational.
I know this is only a snapshot and it is the Easter holidays but it does seem at the moment that Ryanair's decision to move into EXT and expand at CWL is paying off. For example, on 6 April, the first Saturday of the school holidays in many areas, the next EXT-MLA was sold out and the next CWL-MLA nearly so. At the same time the next five BRS-MLA flights were already all sold out. It does suggest that a lot of new passengers used the services as they obviously could not all have used the 3 x weekly BRS-MLA, had that been the only option from south west Britain as would have been the case last year. The next test will be May when Air Malta and Thomas Cook resume their own BRS-MLA flights.
EXT-AGP seems to be in a similar position with sold out or nearly sold out flights which don't seem to have affected Ryanair's BRS-AGP: one of the two BRS-AGPs flights is sold out tomorrow as are some later in the week. easyJet doesn't seem to be suffering either with its double-daily BRS-AGP operation - four of the next six BRS-AGP are sold out.
So it does seem that EXT (and CWL) are generating considerable numbers of new passengers. Obviously early days, but if this trend continues and yields are satisfactory it might well be the case that these airports can expect more Ryanair routes to the popular destinations.