Ryanair, Europe’s largest low-cost carrier, has announced a raft of new routes from the largest base on its network at London-Stansted Airport (STN). The announcement was made on January 29. 2025 – the same day that the UK Government revealed an intention to expedite expansion plans at several London airports, which included building a third runway at London-Heathrow Airport (LHR) and allowing further growth at Stansted located some 30 miles (50km) to the north of the capital.
Building on its solid footing at Stansted Airport, where it is the largest airline by some considerable margin, Ryanair said it would be opening seven new routes for the northern summer of 2025 to various destinations across Europe previously unserved from the airport.
The new routes will include flights to Bodrum and Dalaman (Turkey), Clermont-Ferrand (France), Münster and Lübeck (Germany), Linz (Austria), and Reggio Calabria (Italy). In addition to these new services, Ryanair will increase frequencies on 30 other routes currently served from Stansted including those to Gdansk (Poland), Ibiza, Valencia, and Malaga (Spain), plus Milan, Rome, and Turin in Italy.
To support this traffic and network growth, Ryanair will base a further new Boeing 737-8200 at the airport during the summer of 2025, which the carrier states will represent an additional investment of $100m investment in its primary London base. Additionally, the extra airplane will create 30 new jobs for pilots, cabin crew, and engineers, states the airline. During the peak summer 2025 season, Ryanair will have a total of 56 aircraft based at Stansted.
Taking aim at UK airport tax
Despite Ryanair announcing its growth at Stansted, the announcement by the UK Government covering London airports has been met with mixed responses from the UK aviation community and others. According to a Ryanair statement, while the airline is continuing to grow traffic and tourism in London, regional UK connectivity and tourism are “suffering under the UK Labour Government which while claiming to champion growth, having bizarrely increased airport departure tax (APD) on short-haul flights by £2 ($2.60) per passenger from 2026, which damages growth and makes the UK uncompetitive.
“This APD tax hike further penalizes ordinary UK families traveling abroad on holidays and deters millions of potential visitors to the UK, who will travel instead to countries like Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, who are abolishing aviation taxes or are reducing airport fees to stimulate growth. The anti-growth increase in UK APD is damaging tourism and economic growth in the UK regions, and Ryanair calls on Rachel Reeves to immediately abolish this stupid APD tax, which will deliver immediate and dramatic growth across the regions.,” the statement adds.
According to Ryanair, “Rachel Reeves’ bizarre decision to raise APD taxes by £2 per passenger damages the growth prospects of the UK, and in particular regional UK airports. Rachel Reeves is trying to distract people by floating a third runway at Heathrow (or a second at Gatwick), which even if approved, won’t arrive for 10 or 20 years, long after the life of this Labour Government. If she is serious about delivering growth, then she should abolish the penal and damaging APD tax, which makes the UK uncompetitive when EU countries like Sweden, Hungary, Ireland, and regions in Italy are abolishing aviation taxes, and winning dramatic traffic, tourism, and jobs growth from the UK.”
Michael O’Leary’s view
In a press briefing held in London on Wednesday, January 30, 2025, Ryanair’s chairman Michael O’Leary claimed Rachel Reeves “hasn’t a clue” about how to generate growth in aviation. O’Leary said the UK chancellor should scrap APD rather than “waffle on” about Heathrow expansion, which he described as “a dead cat” that would not happen before the 2040s at the earliest.
“The UK continues to lose out on enormous growth opportunities because of a chancellor who hasn’t a clue about how to deliver growth, has had five years to get ready for it, and yet has managed to screw it up in her first budget. Nothing is designed to damage growth faster than increasing taxes on air travel. If the third runway at Heathrow ever arrives, it will be about 2040, 2045, or 2050 – in fact, long after I’ve departed from Ryanair,” O’Leary concluded.
