Ryanair lands at Milan’s Malpensa Airport

Milan - Ryanair will arrive at Malpensa on 1 December. Milan’s international airport will be the Irish company’s 15th base in Italy and its 73rd in Europe. The announcement, which came after a series of leaks, was made by the company’s respective chiefs: Chief Commercial Officer David O’Brien, and Chief Operational Officer Giulio de Metrio. The new routes out of Malpensa’s Terminal 1, which is linked directly to the railway station, will be London (two flights per day), Comiso (one per day), Bucharest (4 per week) and Seville (three per week).

As usual, Ryanair is offering one-way tickets for only €9.90 to support the initiative. ‘We are the number one company in Italy and we will grow at both airports,” O’Brien commented, which rules out a parallel development at the company’s historic base at Orio al Serio in Bergamo. Ryanair has a 26% market share in Italy and a goal of 27 million passengers transported by the end of 2015, out of a total of 103 million in all of Europe. The company has planned to invest €100 million in a new aircraft for Malpensa, and the four new routes will allow for 450,000 passengers to be transported per year, resulting in an estimated 450 additional jobs, according to the guidelines of Airports Council International.

After eight years of back and forth, the Irish company’s chief, Michael O’Leary, finally did it. The extravagant manager appeared in Milan in October, 2007, after leaving Alitalia, in a blue number 50 shirt that read “Mamma Mia,” to woo SEA’s top management - and with $100 billion to sweeten the deal. The offer did not convince then-President Giuseppe Bonomi, who was aiming for agreements with traditional airlines like Lufthansa. But now Chief Pietro Modiano has given his blessing to the arrival of “an airline that generates traffic and doesn’t aim to take it away from the others.” He explained, “It is an important challenge for us.” Modiano expects “gradual growth, compatible with the fact that Malpensa is growing - because it is an airport without a leader - and we want this to move forward.”