Ryanair will fly from Budapest to a bankrupted airport almost bought by Putin-close oligarch
The Irish low-cost airline announced a new flight from Budapest to Germany, but the destination airport was bankrupted before and is very far from the closest big German city.
According to okosutas.hu, Frankfurt-Hahn is connected to Frankfurt only by name and the marketing experts. Frankfurt is one of the most important German cities, home of Europe’s sixth biggest international airport. However, Hahn is almost 120 km from the main airgate, so you must drive at least 1.5 hours to reach it from the Ruhr region city on the banks of River Rhein. Hahn is closer to Luxembourg than Frankfurt.
Ryanair announced that they would launch a new flight there. We wrote about their announcement in THIS article. The planes will commute twice a week between the two cities but only between June and September. The first plane will take off on 2 June.
Frankfurt-Hahn (a successful marketing trick) was very popular in the 2000s when budget airlines did not fly to big city airports. Such cheap airports were good for them. That changed in the last two decades, and low-cost airlines tend to travel to the main airports but keep some of the small ones.
Frankfurt-Hahn – Lake Balaton flights will also return?
Hahn was at the top in 2007 with more than 5 million passengers. However, in 2021, that number went below 1 million. As a result, the airport went bankrupt, but the first buyer did not pay for it. Then, a Putin-close oligarch came, but after the invasion, he became a persona non grata.
Finally, they could find an investor who saw an opportunity in the airport far from Frankfurt but in a region densely populated. The new owner invested a significant amount of money into the development of the airport. Moreover, the main airport of Frankfurt increased its costs, so budget airlines left in 2022. Following that, Ryanair started to increase the number of its flights to Hahn last year. Thus, it is understandable why they relaunched their Budapest-Frankfurt-Hahn flight this year.
This may help people because low-cost flights are rare to that German region from Budapest. And who knows? Maybe the once popular Frankfurt-Hahn-Sármellék (Lake Balaton) flight will also return.
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