Ryanair cancels four routes at Alicante airport

Airlines are starting to show their itineraries for this year’s high season, which runs from the end of March to the end of October 2026. There is still a little over a month left in the low season. Several airlines have said they will be flying to Alicante-Elche Airport more often and adding new routes to far-off places like Yerevan, Armenia, and Casablanca, Morocco.

The airport expects more growth in peak season, with a busy schedule and a prediction of more than 10 million one-way seats to Alicante-Elche Airport between early 2026 and October. Even though these numbers show that business will be good, Ryanair has opted to terminate four routes it ran during the last peak season.

Tenerife North is one of these routes. The airline has stopped some of its flights there since it is having a dispute with Aena over higher fees at smaller airports. Vueling will run this route during the busiest times of the year. Another cancelled route is a domestic one: the trip to Barcelona, which had four flights a week last summer on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

Ryanair has also stopped flying to Maastricht in the Netherlands and Klagenfurt in Austria, two places it flew to last year. The airline’s website no longer lists these itineraries, which were only available in the summer. It is strange that these two Central European flights are being cancelled because the Netherlands is one of Alicante-Elche Airport’s biggest markets, after the UK and Germany. Ryanair started flying to Linz and Salzburg in Austria last summer. The airline chose to keep both of them going during the off-season because they did so well.

So, even though Ryanair has announced numerous new routes to Germany and is keeping the Bratislava service that started during the off-season, they will have one less link than last summer. The Irish airline will fly directly to 21 nations from 89 different places. But the higher frequencies on important routes in England and Central Europe do provide it a small benefit in available seats.

Air capacity to Alicante-Elche Airport: From January to October 2026, air capacity has grown a lot. It went from 9.43 million seats in 2025 to almost 10.3 million arrivals already scheduled, an 8.8% increase, according to data from Hosbec. July has the most scheduled arrivals, with over 1.2 million seats.

One in three tickets going to Alicante-Elche Airport are from the UK, which is still the most important market. Spain is next with a 12% stake, and the Netherlands and Germany both have over 6%. Belgium and Poland each have a 5% stake, while Norway and France both have more than 4%.