The European budget giant is positioned for summer and putting an emphasis on growth markets after prompt arrival of Boeing aircraft, writes Graham Dunn
European low-cost giant Ryanair enters this summer on the front foot, buoyed by the timely arrival of new aircraft.
Ryanair’s previous summer growth plans have been partly capped by the late arrival of Boeing 737 Max 8-200s. But with the US manufacturer seemingly over the worst of its production and delivery challenges, Ryanair will start the key season with all its planned Max jets deliveries in place.
“That will allow us – we think – to deliver 4% traffic growth next year,” said Ryanair Group Chief Executive Michael O’Leary, speaking at the carrier’s third-quarter earnings call in late January. Ryanair, which will carry around 208 million passengers in the year to March 2026, expects this to grow to 216 million in the next 12 months.
Ryanair will this summer open a base in the Albanian capital Tirana, on top of its recent addition of the Moroccan city of Rabat and Trapani in Italy. These bases, O’Leary said, are in line with the “churn” in the airline’s network as it switches growth away from higher-cost airports and regions.
“This winter we have allocated Ryanair’s scarce capacity to those countries, regions and airports who are cutting aviation taxes and incentivising traffic growth, such as Albania, regional Italy, Morocco, Slovakia and Sweden,” he said. “This trend, or churn, will continue into summer 2026 as we operate over 106 new routes.”
Strong Competition
While O’Leary expects strong competition on fares in some markets – such as Albania, where budget rival Wizz Air is also expanding – overall he flagged the relatively small increase in European short-haul capacity this summer.
“There is no doubt that the capacity is still heavily constrained. We think that will lead to higher pricing, especially from our competitor airlines,” he said.
O’Leary is also positive about the arrival next year of the first of 300 Max 10 jets it has on order. Ryanair is due to take delivery of the first 15 larger Max 10s between February and May 2027. While the aircraft is still be certificated, O’Leary said Boeing expects this to take place over the summer.
“They [Boeing] are increasingly confident, in fact I would say very confident, that they will meet their contracted delivery dates to Ryanair for the first 15 Max [10]s in the spring of 2027,” he said.
While Ryanair has only ordered Boeing aircraft, it operates a small fleet of Airbus narrowbodies through its Austrian Lauda operation. These, though, are approaching replacement.
O’Leary said that in an ideal world he would like to order 50 Airbus aircraft to replace these, but lack of sufficiently early delivery slots, combined with pricing, makes this difficult. He said Ryanair’s fallback position is to extend leases and then replace them with Max 10s.
“But I would prefer to keep Lauda Air as an Airbus operator,” he added. “I think it is useful to have some Airbus operation in the overall fleet generally.”
