Ryanair has today moved to 100% digital boarding passes. This means that from today passengers will no longer be able to download and print a physical paper boarding pass but will instead need to use the digital boarding pass generated in their “myRyanair” app during check-in to board their Ryanair flight. This transition, already adopted by nearly 80% of Ryanair’s 207M+ annual passengers, will deliver a faster, smarter, and greener travel experience. It will also give passengers easier access to a range of innovative in-app features.
Ryanair has also said that is considering further reducing capacity at regional airports in Spain in the 2026-2027 winter season after cutting three million seats since the summer of 2024, according to an interview with EFE by its CEO, Eddie Wilson. Highly critical of Spanish airport authority Aena and the fees it charges airlines, mainly at secondary airports, he claims that the airport model in Spain is ‘broken’ because, except for Madrid, Barcelona and the Balearics, the rest of the airports ‘are empty’.
‘Next winter looks bad,’ says Wilson, who adds that they will ‘probably’ cut seats again. ‘It’s inevitable because they’re not doing anything about prices.’
‘If the lowest-cost airline, with the lowest fares and the largest in Europe, says there is a problem with prices at regional airports, it’s because there is a problem with prices at regional airports, and that problem has not been solved,’ he said. In Spain, where Ryanair is the second most important market for the airline after Italy, and where it is the leader ahead of Iberia and Vueling, ‘we should be growing more,’ but traffic is shifting to other places.
‘If there is a flight from London to an airport in Spain and it is cheaper to go to Italy, the distance is the same; we simply go to Italy. We are committed to Spain. The problem is that the government does not seem to be. They are not committed to their regional airports,’ according to Wilson. If regional airports were competitive, ‘they would be saturated,’ as is the case in Italy, where they are ‘a resounding success’ because they have air traffic, have lowered local taxes and have encouraged airlines to increase passenger volume, in addition to making money from parking, shops and services, he explained.
Last week, the company announced two new aircraft at a secondary airport in Trapani, on the island of Sicily, ‘which are the equivalent of the aircraft lost in Santiago de Compostela,’ because they are much more competitive. In his opinion, regional politicians and the inhabitants of these regions know that the use of airports has been ‘artificially’ restricted by the pricing policies of Aena, which is a monopoly ‘that does not care about competition’ and has a regulatory framework ‘that protects them from negotiation’.
For this reason, he believes that the fees charged by the Spanish airport operator should boost the growth and occupancy of airports, ‘which are operating, security personnel are present, car parks are open, electricity and lights are on, air traffic control is working, everything is ready to operate’.
Even so, ‘there are no planes’, so if prices were to fall, Ryanair and other airlines would increase their capacity, especially at airports such as Zaragoza, Santiago, Jerez and Granada, where ‘we will consider what capacity we could allocate there’.
The first thing the government and Aena should do, Wilson explains, is to sit down and talk to the airlines, as happens at other airports in Europe, “where you sit down with an empty airport and say: let’s fill this airport, and create jobs and allow both the airport and the airline to survive.
However, in Spain ‘it doesn’t work like that’: airlines can never negotiate prices with Aena because they are set by the regulatory authority.
He argues that the company has invested €11 billion in aircraft based here. In addition to the pilot training centre that opened in Madrid on Tuesday, there are two other maintenance centres in Madrid and Seville and an innovation centre also in the Spanish capital. According to data provided by its chief executive, Ryanair contributes 2% of the national GDP, has 10,000 employees here and, thanks to the traffic it moves, generates almost 400,000 jobs in Spain.