At a news conference, Ryanair’s Chief Commercial Officer David O’Brien said the new route will be available on Mondays and Fridays, and is designed to serve businessmen and government officials. The flights will offer 750 seats per week, and are scheduled to commence on January 18, 2016. Ryanair also announced special fares starting at €19.99 for the flight, available until midnight Thursday.
In March, Cyprus’ Transport Minister Marios Demetriades had said flights to Brussels were not financially viable for airlines so the route became a Public Service Obligation (PSO) where €500,000 in grants was available since the end of 2014.
Ryanair, which also operates a third Brussels route – from Paphos – said it decided not to take the government up on this offer, thus saving the Cypriot taxpayer €3 million a year.
The airline’s Paphos to Charleroi route on Sundays will be unaffected.
But, the company’s CCO said, Ryanair will “cut back slightly in Paphos”, owing to Cyprus’ similarities with other nearby destinations, such as Chania, Crete.
“The difficulty here in Cyprus is that there has to be a compelling reason to fly people from Poland over Greece for another hour – burning fuel for another hour – to get to Cyprus, because to the untrained eye, the offering is similar,” he said.
“You are in a challenging physical location – you have all the advantages of sunshine, sea, etc. but they are not dissimilar to Greece. They’re quite similar. You are geographically – not culturally, but geographically – peripheral to many of the larger airlines.”
Additionally, he said, high airport fees are also a hindrance. “The Cyprus airport monopoly prices are twice as high as Greece,” O’Brien said.
“What you have to hope is that the Greek government makes the same mistake as a previous Cypriot government made, and create an airport monopoly that puts up prices so you will look good, because at the moment, you don’t look good.”
In addition to “a previous government’s decision to create an airport monopoly”, O’Brien reflected on what he thought was yet more poor decision-making on Ryanair’s offer for Cyprus Airways last year.
“Just like our offer for Cyprus Airways was described as ‘not in the best interest of Cyprus’ – that’s what (finance) minister (Harris) Georgiades had said at the time, because he wanted a ‘real’ investor, or the company’s employees, to buy it,” he said.
“It’s a pity Mr Georgiades didn’t consider us a ‘real’ investor – I think he is supposed to have said something like ‘charlatans’, but I can’t imagine that a man as refined as Mr Georgiades would have actually said that, so I presume the Cyprus Mail just misquoted him.”
O’Brien was referring to a remark made by Georgiades at a parliament session discussing the future of Cyprus Airways, then in crisis modeas it anticipated a European Competition Commission that eventually meant its demise.
The Cyprus government had invited ‘expressions of interest’ for the takeover of the failing airline, and twenty-two were filed. Of these, only two proposals warranted serious consideration – Ryanair’s and Aegean’s – but some of the rest, although financially more attractive, were so obscure in terms of the identity of the actual investor that Georgiades had to justify the decision to reject them rather crudely.
“We are looking for a real investor, not a charlatan,” he had told deputies at the time.
Airport operator Hermes spokesman said he was surprised by Ryanair’s comments as it was an airline that reaped the full benefits of the incentive scheme offered by the company.
Ryanair pays very low fees at Cypriot airports, Adamos Aspris said.
Aspris said over 70 airlines fly to and from Cyprus and a substantial number benefited from the incentives, though which more tourists were brought to Cyprus.
The incentive schemes make airport fees competitive, he said.
Source: Cyprus Mail
