Ryanair, the airline with the most flights at Alicante-Elche Airport, will once again focus on the Alicante terminal throughout the summer. This will mean more planes and more flights. The low-cost airline made this announcement yesterday, Thursday February 26th, at an event at the Ciutat d’Elx convention centre.
During the summer, the Irish airline will have up to 6.6 million seats available, which represents a 10% increase. This boost is due to the fact that the corporation now has 20 planes, two more than it did last year.
Ryanair’s spokesperson and communications director in Spain, Alejandra Ruiz, said that the carrier will fly more than 582 times a week on 89 routes. She also said that new flights have been added to 40 popular routes, including Porto and Liverpool. These new routes, two to Germany and the continuance of the winter service to Bratislava, Slovakia, are in addition to the increased frequency.
After a record-breaking winter season in which Ryanair doubled down on its commitment to Alicante Airport, the airline is once again investing in passenger traffic in Alicante, one of its main bases in Spain. It expects to handle around nine million passengers in 2026, which would be an 11% increase over 2025, which was an absolute record year. Ruiz said that this big investment in Alicante will create 7,300 direct and indirect jobs and cost 2 billion euros.
To put this big surge in perspective, Ryanair’s communications director said that before the pandemic, they were already handling more than four million people at Alicante-Elche Airport. By 2023, that number had grown to six million. “Since then, we’ve added about a million passengers to the total each year,” Ruiz said.
Aena is at odds with
The Ryanair official said during the presentation that “we are in a difficult situation because Aena announced a fee increase.” Ruiz said that the 21% increase planned for 2031 was “despite growing traffic.” Ryanair said that the traffic will let them make the improvements needed “for Alicante to continue growing.”
