00:00Ryanair says it's increasing its presence at Liverpool John Lennon Airport for winter
00:052026. Six of those routes are new. They are services to Milan, Bergamo, Copenhagen, Gdansk,
00:13Porto, Tirana and Warsaw. There'll also be an increased number of flights on three existing
00:19routes, Krakow, Kaunas and Cork.
00:22Liverpool is a great market for us. We have great support here from the people of the
00:27north west from Liverpool and surrounding regions. We have some great city breaks in
00:31there. So the likes of Copenhagen is great for city breaks in the winter. You've got Warsaw and Poland,
00:36which again, not just for Christmas markets, but again, a really good city break. New places like
00:43Tirana in Albania, which is thriving, really interesting spot.
00:46The airline says the expanded schedule will take Liverpool traffic to more than 2.6 million passengers
00:53a year. That's a 24% increase. We've actually been operating here since 1988 and this is our
01:00largest ever winter schedule. We have six based aircraft here, an additional 100 million euro
01:06investment by putting the sixth aircraft in this winter. That's driving jobs, it's driving tourism
01:11and it's helping support the local economy. So we're big contributors to the market here
01:16and the people of Liverpool love our low fares, which is great to see.
01:19The airline says the investment will also support more than 2,130 jobs locally.
01:25To announce more growth at the airport, which we've done for the last few years is great,
01:29but to have Ryanair commit to us again in the winter and to add a double-digit percentage of
01:35growth is brilliant. More routes going into the winter and two new routes that we don't fly to
01:41with Copenhagen and Gdansk. So more choice for passengers, great for the airport. For us,
01:46trying to soften that peak out is an important thing and Ryanair are brilliant at helping us do that.
01:51The announcement also includes criticism from Ryanair of the UK's air passenger duty,
01:57as well as the so-called tourist tax. The airline argues that APD tax makes regional airports
02:03less competitive and has called for it to be abolished.
02:07Yeah, I think if you look across Europe, what's actually happening in markets like Sweden, Slovakia,
02:13Hungary, regional Italy, all these markets are scrapping tax because they know tax kills growth
02:19and it kills any incentive for airlines to put additional capacity into a marketplace.
02:24What you have the opposite here in the UK, where you have a government that is double taxing visitors,
02:29so there's an APD cost that's going from 13 euro to 15, which is very damaging. And now we're going
02:36to
02:36have additional visitor tax like Liverpool and Manchester have introduced, that's double taxation
02:41on passengers. And if you look at what happens across Europe, taxation is the fastest way to kill
02:46growth and to send tourism backwards. So, you know, we would really call on the government to be
02:52scrapping the APD tax so that we can grow further here in regions like Liverpool.
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