Dublin Airport has said the addition of four new airlines and 14 new routes will make the coming months a "record summer".
More than 1.7 million extra seats have been added across the airport’s route network, which is an 8 per cent increase in capacity when compared to last summer.
The new airlines are Cathay Pacific, Croatia Airlines, Hainan Airlines and Icelandair. The new routes comprise five long-haul and nine short-haul destinations.
Of the five new long-haul routes, Aer Lingus has already started services to Philadelphia, and the airline will launch its Seattle route in May.
This June will see the start of Air Canada’s new summer service to Montreal, while Cathay Pacific will fly direct to Hong Kong, and Hainan Airlines will commence a new direct service to Beijing.
“We are continuously working with existing and new airline customers to provide more choice for consumers, and to add new destinations to our route network,” said Dublin Airport managing director Vincent Harrison.
“We are particularly looking forward to welcoming our new services into the Asia Pacific region when direct services to Hong Kong and Beijing start in June.”
The number of seats to and from North America is up 14 per cent, with an extra 391,000 seats this year.
The peak summer months will see 10 airlines flying 446 flights per week to and from 16 destinations in the US and four destinations in Canada, which equates to an average of 64 flights daily to and from North America.
Additional seats
Overall capacity on existing European routes is set to increase 8 per cent, with an extra one million additional seats this summer.
Dublin Airport has nine new continental European services. Ryanair has begun new services to Marrakesh and Paphos, and the airline will add Dalaman in Turkey, Frankfurt and Luxembourg to its route network later this year.
Icelandair will commence a new service to Reykjavik, while British Airways will fly to Manchester. Croatia Airlines will launch services to Zagreb. Elsewhere, Loganair will operate flights to Carlisle airport in the Lake District.
More than six million passengers have travelled through Dublin Airport in the first quarter of this year, representing a 4 per cent increase, or an extra 248,500 passengers, compared to the same period last year.
The airport will have flights to 195 destinations in 42 countries this summer, operated by 56 airlines.
Schedule
Separately, Aer Lingus has reduced the number of flights operating on the Cork-Amsterdam route, removing a Thursday evening flight from the schedule. A spokeswoman for the airline said that growing Aer Lingus’s presence at Cork was “a key priority”, but there was greater demand for leisure destinations than cities.
“Demand for city destinations declines in the summer and demand for leisure destinations increases. Thus aircraft that serve Amsterdam in the winter months have been deployed to leisure destinations such as Alicante, Las Palmas and Barcelona.”
