Ryanair announces new routes from Budapest

Ryanair released its full winter schedule from Budapest, which includes several surprises.

The Irish budget airline announced earlier this year that it will launch two new routes from Budapest to two Portuguese cities – Lisbon and Porto – in addition to two Southern French destinations, namely Bordeaux and Toulouse.

Now they have announced numerous new ones: Luxembourg, Gothenburg in Sweden, Poznan in Poland, Catania in Italy’s Sicily, Tel-Aviv in Israel and Finland’s Lappeenranta. The latter is especially interesting as few have probably heard of the small Finnish town with only 70,000 inhabitants.

Located in the southeast of the country, Lappeenranta is just 26 kilometres from the Russian border and just 200 kilometres from St. Petersburg. There is a scheduled bus service between the Finnish town and the Russian metropolis, which visitors can take relatively cheaply; tickets cost €18 each way at the time of writing and the journey takes just under 4 hours. Ryanair does not fly to Russia, meaning this is the closest it can get to the country without actually landing in Russian territory.

Ryanair have also announced new routes in its winter schedule, such as Bari and Cagliari in Italy, Cork in Ireland, Seville in Spain and Greece’s Thessaloniki. These Ryanair routes will already start operating this summer.

However, from the new destinations there are several – namely Lisbon, Porto, Bordeaux, Gothenburg, Catania and Tel-Aviv – where WizzAir already flies. Even though WizzAir does not operate its flights to Bordeaux and Porto in the winter season, competition will increase between the two budget airline giants. This may drive down prices, allowing Hungarian residents to explore Europe cheaper.

This move does not only benefit people living in Hungary. The new routes will connect Hungary and Budapest to the rest of Europe more so than previously, which could increase tourism throughout the year, especially in the quieter winter season.

Earlier this month we reported that last year WizzAir had lower operational costs than the Ryanair. These two companies are set to go head-to-head in 2019 to outcompete each other to be the top budget airline in Europe.

Source: origo.hu, bus.sovato.com