European low-fare carrier Ryanair is to open a base at Naples International Airport as it reinforces its position as the largest operator in the Italian scheduled market. The airline will base three Boeing 737-800s in the southern Italian city from summer 2017 to offer 69 weekly flights across a network of 17 destinations.
Its summer schedule will cover Bergamo, Bremen, Copenhagen, East Midlands, Eindhoven, Frankfurt Hahn, Gdansk, Kaunas, Lisbon, Madrid, Manchester, Seville, Stockholm, Toulouse, Treviso, Valencia and Warsaw Modlin with flights being operated on a twice or three times weekly frequency. This will deliver up to one million additional annual passengers into Naples, according to Ryanair with the aircraft due to arrive in March, May and July 2017.
The budget airline has already established itself as the largest carrier in Italy and held a 22.8 per cent share of available capacity this past summer season, according to OAG schedule data. The airline’s arrival into the Naples market means that from the forthcoming summer season it will have a presence at all but one of the 14 largest Italian airports by capacity; its only exception being Linate Airport, the secondary international airport of Milan.
Operations at Naples International Airport are currently dominated by easyJet, which held a 29.7 per cent share of capacity in summer 2016, ahead of Alitalia (12.1 per cent) and meridianafly (10.4 per cent).
The low-cost carrier had a network of 32 destinations in summer 2016 and Ryanair has carefully selected its own route plans to complement its rival, even avoiding the London market which easyJet serves with flights to Gatwick, Luton and Stansted.
Ryanair has grown its activities in Italy at an average annual growth rate of 13.9 per cent over the past ten years and with the addition of Naples International will serve 27 airports across the country in summer 2017 with bases at 16 of them. It overtook national carrier Alitalia as the European country’s largest operator in 2014 and this year has offered more than 24 million seats within and from Italy, over 65,000 each day, equating to approximately 350 departures per day.
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