Ryanair Shifts Germany Focus To Regional Airports

Ryanair is reshaping its German network for summer 2025 by focusing on regional airports while scaling back operations in major cities.

The carrier will introduce 14 new routes and 800,000 additional seats at airports like Baden-Baden, Bremen, Lübeck, Münster and Weeze, but this growth will not compensate for significant capacity cuts in larger markets such as Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig and Dortmund.

The shift comes amid Ryanair's criticism of Germany’s high aviation costs, including air traffic control fees, aviation taxes and security levies. The airline has long argued that these rising costs have left Germany as one of Europe’s worst-performing aviation markets, with capacity in January 2025 at around 79% of pre-pandemic levels.

“While the German aviation market continues to collapse due to the government's abject failure to reduce high access costs, a few German regional airports such as Baden-Baden, Bremen, Lübeck, Münster and Niederrhein [Weeze] have acted with foresight and offset these high security and aviation costs through lower airport fees,” Ryanair CEO Eddie Wilson says.

Ryanair plans to base one new aircraft at Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden Airport and one at Weeze Airport, while five new routes will launch from Baden-Baden, four from Weeze, three from Hamburg Lübeck Blankensee Airport and two from Münster Osnabrück International Airport.

The new services being opened include flights from Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden to Gran Canaria and Seville; Lübeck and Münster to both London Stansted and Malaga; and Weeze to Dubrovnik and Paphos. The routes from Lübeck mark the airline’s return to the airport for the first time since July 2014.

The planned regional additions come three months after Ryanair outlined the closure of bases in Dortmund, Dresden and Leipzig—removing all routes from the airports in summer 2025—and a near 60% reduction in capacity at Hamburg Airport. Capacity is also being reduced by about 17% in Berlin and 6% in Cologne/Bonn.

According to the latest schedules filed with OAG Schedules Analyser, Ryanair plans to offer about 6.2 million departure seats from Germany during the summer 2025 season, down by 5% on summer 2024 and 11% lower than 2019 levels.

DLR, the German aerospace center, reported in December that Germany's low-cost aviation market has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels, remaining more than 30% below 2019 figures. Unlike the broader European market, which has surpassed 2019 levels, the share of low-cost flights in Germany has dropped to under 30%, down from 33% in 2019. By contrast, Europe's low-cost market share now exceeds 35%, representing a 2% increase compared to pre-pandemic figures.