Cork Airport say they expect to host 2 million passengers this year.
It follows this mornings announcement that Ryanair will base a third aircraft at the airport for the summer and offer 7 new routes to Venice, Valencia, Sardinia, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Pisa.
Cork Airport say today’s announcement will knock a year off the time it would have taken to recover to pre-pandemic passenger numbers.
Speaking to RedFM News, Ryanair CEO Eddie Wilson says he expects demand to be strong, but says the aviation section will still need supports for the winter:
"It's now the biggest summer schedule out of Cork. We're confident in terms of putting that capacity in. And it's great that the government have put in a scheme for this summer to encourage us to base aircraft [in Ireland] and I say to the government, extend that at least for the winter so that we can support in bound tourism here in the Southwest for the winter."
Speaking to RedFM News, Managing Director at Cork Airport Niall MacCarthy says the announcement is a huge step towards recovery:
"This will mean we're upgrading our forecast to be over 2 million passengers for 2022. And to put that in context, we had 250,000 in 2021. So it's seven and a half times the level of 2021 traffic. It will bring us back really strongly on the road recovery. We had 2.6 million in 2019 and this will be 77% of our 2019 totals. It's probably knocked a year off the recovery time that the tourism industry was predicting earlier this year."
