Aer Lingus has announced a number of new destinations, new daily services and additional frequencies to its European network. The airline says this brings to 65 the number of short haul routes the airline will operate for Summer 2007.
New routes will see the airline fly from Cork to Manchester from March 2007, Cork to Madrid and Prague from next summer, Dublin to Newcastle and Milan-Malpensa from summer and Dublin to Athens from June 2007.
Aer Lingus says the introduction of the new service to Athens, which will operate three times a week, is a milestone development as it marks the airline's first service to Greece.
Aer Lingus will increase route frequencies to a daily basis from Dublin to Budapest, Geneva, Lisbon, Prague, Venice and Zurich.
Increased frequencies will also be operated on routes from Dublin to Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Dubrovnik, Krakow, Madrid, Naples, Nice, Rennes, Riga and Seville. Cork to Birmingham, Faro and London Heathrow will also see increased frequency.
'The increases announced today respond to customer demand for our services and we look forward to continuing the expansion of our short-haul network from Ireland generally, and to the continued broadening of the network scope out of Cork,' commented Aer Lingus CEO Dermot Mannion.
Aer Lingus today also announced traffic statistics for September. It said that passenger traffic grew by 6.4% to 777,000 passengers in September, up from 730,000 the same time last year.
However, the airline said this increase was negatively impacted by the terrorism alert in the UK in August which resulted in lower levels of advance passenger sales for August, September and October.
The airline said the number of short-haul passengers increased by 8.9% in September while its short-haul load factor was 80%, down 2.2 percentage points from the same time last year.
Long-haul passengers decreased by 9.2% in September, while the airline's long-haul passenger load factor was down 7.4 percentage points to 72.8%.
Aer Lingus said that for the nine months to September, passenger numbers increased by 8.2% to 6,566,000 compared to 6,066,000 passengers carried the same time last year.
Short-haul passengers rose by 10.6% in the nine months. Long-haul traffic decreased by 5.3%, which Aer Lingus said reflected the discontinuation of the Orlando route and the negative impact of the terrorism alert in the US in August.
Aer Lingus shares closed down one at €2.83 in Dublin this evening.
