September the 14th, 2023 – Ryanair has altered travel to and from Zagreb entirely, opening up cheap travel from the Croatian capital to a vast array of European cities in a way that has never been done before. It doesn’t intend to stop there, either, with Ryanair Croatia plans looking very encouraging indeed.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, there are big Ryanair Croatia plans set for 2023’s winter flight schedule, with the popular Irish airline set to connect Zagreb with nineteen routes to various European destinations. One of those winter routes is to the Canary Islands, where it expects an increase in the number of passengers compared to last year’s winter season, according to Ryanair’s commercial director Jason McGuinness.
He expects that over the next few years, Ryanair will operate from its fruitful Zagreb base at Dr. Franjo Tudjman International Airport with 5-6 aircraft and could reach five million passengers per year.
Ryanair is recording fantastic numbers in the post-pandemic period
McGuinness says that traffic is returning well after the end of the coronavirus pandemic, and that Ryanair will have three aircraft running during its winter flight schedule from Zagreb. He claims that the company indirectly supports more than a thousand jobs in Zagreb, and 90 jobs directly (pilots, cabin crew, engineers).
It isn’t without reason that the Ryanair Croatia plans are as grand as they are. McGuinness also stated that in the fiscal year from April 2022 to the end of March 2023, the company transported 1.2 million passengers to and from Zagreb. That figure marked a 22% increase when compared to the previous fiscal year. He expects similar growth in the current year. According to him, the top three European destinations with which Ryanair connects Zagreb are London Stansted, Bergamo and Dublin.
In addition to plans for this year’s winter flight schedule for Zagreb with an impressive nineteen routes, McGuinness also announced an increase in the number of flights operating on existing routes to Basel, Dublin, Gothenburg, Malaga, Malta, Memmingen and Paris Beauvais.
Although it was previously announced as a possibility, Ryanair will not fly to Zadar over the winter period this year. When speaking about the total amount of flights offered to and from the Republic of Croatia, he believes that in the current fiscal year, the Irish carrier could reach the figure of three million passengers.
When asked about cooperation with Zagreb’s Dr. Franjo Tudjman Airport and the fees they pay, he said that they are satisfied, although any increase in fees affects costs for passengers, which Ryanair tries to minimise as much as possible.
