Malaga escapes Ryanair's cuts: only loses the flight to Santiago

Málaga Airport escapes the seat cuts announced by the low-cost airline Ryanair, which leads the Costa del Sol in passenger volume, for the winter season. However, it will be affected by the closure of the operations base in Santiago de Compostela as it will stop flying from the Malaga facility, which will still maintain a direct flight with this Galician city as the airline Vueling also operates this route.

From the Irish company, which holds a 30% business share at the Costa del Sol airport, they assure this newspaper that "according to today's announcement of cuts in the winter 2025 schedule, Málaga is excluded, so it will not suffer cuts." Last year, in the low season, which begins with the time change at the end of October and lasts until March, it connected the Costa del Sol with 78 cities out of the 128 destinations worldwide that these facilities had direct flights to. This company has one of its main bases in the country in Málaga, with twelve flights based at this infrastructure in the winter of 2024. A figure that increases in summer.

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It is worth remembering that this Tuesday, the airline confirmed the threat made a few weeks ago to eliminate one million seats for the next winter season in Spain by canceling a total of 36 direct connections with regional or secondary airports in the country, that is, those with less than three million passengers, and with the Canary Islands. The reason given for this decision is the "excessive" fees and lack of competitiveness at these facilities attributed to Aena. The announcement indicated that these cuts represent a 41% reduction in air traffic at these facilities, about 600,000 seats.

The measure will affect Santiago the most, by closing its base of two planes, which will result in a loss of an investment of 200 million dollars; Vigo, where it suspends all flights starting next January 1; Zaragoza, with a 45% reduction in capacity; Santander, with a decrease of 38%; Asturias, with a drop of 16%; and Vitoria, with 2% fewer seats. Additionally, it will continue without operating at the Valladolid and Jerez airports during the winter. Also, it will reduce its seat offer in the Canaries by 10%, which means 400,000 seats, with a cancellation of 36 connections with the Peninsula and the suspension of all its flights to Tenerife North from October 1.

However, at Málaga Airport, only the loss of the flight to Santiago will be felt because with the rest of the routes there was either no connection or it was not included in the reduction of air capacity.

Firm response

The decision of the airline has received firm responses both from the Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu, and from the president and CEO of Aena, Maurici Lucena. The government assures that it will not "submit" to the "arbitrary decisions" of this company and will look for alternatives for the affected airports. For his part, Lucena states that "it is difficult to find in contemporary business history another case like Ryanair where the discord between the operational excellence of a company and the dishonesty of its communication policy is so astonishing." He also notes that "the insolence and uninhibitedness of Ryanair's public demands on democratic governments in the countries where it operates its planes, to obtain economic advantages, reveal two very entrenched and unedifying characteristics of this airline."

Lucena insists that according to the regulatory framework of Aena's activity and the mandatory application of objective mathematical formulas, he has proposed an increase in airport tariffs in 2026 of 0.68 euros and emphasizes that "everyone knows that a citizen's decision to take a plane does not depend on whether the ticket costs 68 cents more next year, but Ryanair insists time and again on the contrary while, unblushingly, the Irish airline has raised its plane tickets by an average of 21% last year!".