On the 1st April, Ryanair announced five new routes saying that it planned to become “Portugal’s biggest airline”, but within days it had axed one of them, the domestic link joining Lisbon with Faro – originally marketed at the knock-down price of just €9.99.
Said Luis Fernández-Mellado, the firm’s head of sales and marketing for Iberia, Ryanair simply doesn’t have the “fleet capacity” for a “domestic route like this”.
“We regret that Ryanair is not in a position to schedule the times and frequencies needed”, he told Presstur’s website, confirming that the new route will now cease to exist from April 24.
Anyone who may have purchased tickets for flights after this date, will be “contacted and refunded” or given an alternative flight plan.
Without suggesting the route could be reinstated in the future, Fernández-Mellado said that fleet capacity would be increased from the winter of 2015 when Ryanair is buying “the first of 175 new aircraft from Boeing”.
