Ryanair Gets More Domestic

Today Ryanair announced that from November on, they'll be flying four domestic routes between Madrid and Alicante, Palma, Santiago de Compostela, and Valencia. Ryanair has been amping up domestic flights within larger countries over the last several months. With these routes, I'm counting 18 domestic routes running or planned to run within Spain, including routes to the Canary Islands.

That's nothing compared to the 22 routes Ryanair runs or plans to run within Italy. Ryanair also flies 16 domestic routes within the UK, most of them to and from Derry or Belfast in Northern Ireland. The airline also maintains three domestic routes apiece in France and Germany.

I'm ready to say that this domestic route approach is turning into the key route map development of 2008 for Ryanair. I expected the airline to slowly but consistently open up additional destinations in places like Bulgaria, Ukraine, Israel, and Turkey over the course of the year. None of that has happened, at least not yet. Instead, we've got more and more domestic routes. In some markets, this approach to route development is clearly designed to provide an alternative to flailing local carriers; in France and Germany, the goal seems to be to simply mark territory, subtly hinting at what might happen if the airline decided to expand domestic routes more fully.

Comments

[David]

The train (remember this is Europe - this is not a dirty word) runs from Valencia to Madrid in 3h30, goes every 2 hours, and for a walk-up fare costs 44 euros.

Unlike Easyjet, Ryanair are not business friendly (tickets are nonrefundable and awkward to change and not available to business travel agents).

Further, Madrid is a big airport and is very unlikely to have given Ryanair a particularly cheap rate. With the inevitable delays, planes also need to spend longer on turnaround time.

This means the maximum fare Ryanair can charge is 44 euros - even booking a mere 24 hours in advance. Difficult to see how they can make any money - looks more likely to be a spoiler against Spanair instead.

[Alex Robertson Textor]

Thanks for your comment. I agree that one of the impulses behind Ryanair's shift toward flying more domestic routes is to act as a spoiler against local carriers. I don't think that making money off every route is necessarily their first goal. They love projecting a cultivated sense of invulnerability. In addition, Ryanair appear to fly at least some of their routes with very low frequencies, which may give them the freedom to claim a degree of route saturation broader than it is deep. See this article. It is about six months old, but I think it's still valid: http://www.anna.aero/2008/04/11/ryanair-drives-down-average-frequency-of-low-cost-routes.

Incidentally, I took the train from Valencia to Madrid last summer and it was fab, infinitely preferable to a short-haul flight between the two cities.