RYANAIR HAS announced it is planning to move nine routes from Manchester airport to competing airports in the region.

The airline said yesterday it was switching routes to airports in East Midlands, Leeds Bradford and Liverpool from October 1st after the airport refused to cut charges. The only route to remain in place will be the Manchester-Dublin flights.

The move will mean the loss of 44 weekly flights and 600,000 passengers every year to the airport, Ryanair said. It also claimed 600 local jobs would go in Manchester as a result.

Ryanair’s Manchester routes include Barcelona (Girona), Bremen, Brussels (Charleroi), Cagliari, Dusseldorf (Weeze), Frankfurt (Hahn), Marseille, Milan (Bergamo) and Shannon.

The airline said it had offered the airport an extra 28 weekly flights, which would have generated an estimated 400,000 new passengers and created 400 jobs, on the condition that the airport reduced its charges. However, it refused the offer, and the decision was made to move nine of the 10 routes from Manchester Airport.

Affected passengers are being offered refunds or alternative flights.

However, officials at Manchester Airport denied that charges were unreasonable.

“Notwithstanding all our investment in Manchester airport including during the current recession, we don’t believe that charges as low as £3 per passenger are unreasonable. Clearly Ryanair do; that’s regrettable,” a spokesman for the airport said.

“Passengers will still be able to travel directly to the majority of the destinations affected by choosing other airlines.”

In July, Ryanair announced it would cut the number of flights it operates at Dublin airport by 20 per cent during the winter season, to fewer than 1,000 a week. Chief executive Michael O’Leary blamed the Government’s €20 tourist tax for the move.

It also said it would reduce seating capacity by 40 per cent at its London Stansted airport base this winter, cutting the number of aircraft there to 24 from 40, again due to high fees.