Ireland West Airport Knock were delighted to welcome the inaugural flights from mainland Europe with Ryanair to the West of Ireland today, Tuesday 27th March 2012. New services from Barcelona, Paris and Frankfurt with Ryanair arrived in before lunch time with German, French and Spanish tourists greeted as they landed on Irish soil by the Minister for State at the Department of Transport, Tourism & Sport, Mr Michael Ring TD. The first flight from Milan in Italy arrived in on Sunday 25th March.
The new services are expected to bring over 30,000 new tourists to the region with the potential of generating an associated tourism spend of over €23m for the local economy and Ireland West Knock will be the only airport along the entire West Coast of Ireland providing direct low cost jet access to these major European markets.
It was a busy day all round at the airport as the summer 2012 schedule commenced with the launch of additional flights to Faro-Algarve, Alicante and Gran Canaria with Ryanair and a new 3 times weekly service to Leeds-Bradford with Flybe. This May will also see Europes largest airline, Lufthansa, commence a new weekly service from Dusseldorf in Germany.
In further good news this week the airport announced that 40 new jobs have been created at the airport in advance of the airports busiest ever summer season and the new hires commenced work this week across a range of departments such as Security, operations and customer services.
In total there will be over 28 International destinations served from the airport this summer with over 150 weekly low fare flights available to and from destinations in the UK and Europe. The airport expects to have its busiest year in 2012 with over 710,000 passengers passing through the airport.
Joe Gilmore, Managing Director Ireland West Airport Knock added “We are absolutely delighted to welcome the first passengers and tourists from four of Europe’s biggest markets with Ryanair today which will deliver airline capacity in the region of 100k inbound/outbound seats providing low cost direct access for European tourists to the beautiful west coast of Ireland. With our new summer schedule now in place we are looking forward to our busiest ever summer at the airport and we hope these new services will attract the full support of all in the region as they will require even greater effort on all our behalf’s to ensure they are a success and are maintained for the longer term’
Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said: “Ryanair is delighted to welcome passengers on our 4 new routes to/from Ireland West Knock to Barcelona, Frankfurt, Milan and Paris, taking Ryanair’s Knock routes to 14, which will deliver over 500,000 passengers and sustain more than 500 jobs in the region this summer. To celebrate our 14 routes from Ireland West Knock, Ryanair is releasing 1 million seats with fares from €15.99 for travel across Europe in late April and May. Since seats at these crazy low prices will be snapped up quickly, we urge passengers to book them immediately on www.ryanair.com.”
Flights to Paris Beauvais, Frankfurt-Hahn and Barcelona-Girona will operate every Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday whilst flights to Milan-Bergamo will operate every Wednesday and Sunday.
For further airport information log onto www.irelandwestairport.com; and for information on fares and to book flights log onto www.ryanair.com.
For pictures of the launch day click here
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