The Irish budget airline Ryanair has blamed continued high charges at Manchester Airport for the loss of 600 jobs. The airline is scheduled to close or replace 90% of its routes from Manchester this October.

Over 40 weekly Ryanair scheduled flights will be discontinued as of October 1st, with an estimated loss of 60,000 per year.

The company has made an offer to the Manchester Airport for an extra 28 weekly flights resulting in an additional 400,000 passengers and 400 new jobs on the condition that the airport scale back its ‘high charges’. The airline went on to state that the airport had rejected this new proposal.

The failure to reach an agreement means that existing flights between Bremen, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Marseille, Brussels, Cagliari, Milan and Shannon would all be closed from the 1st of October.

The new base for the carrier will be at Leeds Bradford and Liverpool in the East Midlands.

Those passengers with existing bookings will be contacted directly by Ryanair and offered the choice of a full refund or alternate bookings from competing airports.

Ryanair’s Stephen McNamara said: “Ryanair continues to lower fares to encourage travel, but with passengers paying lower fares airports must lower their charges - particularly high-cost airports like Manchester, Stansted and Dublin” stated Ryanair’s Stephen McNamara. “Ryanair had offered new routes, traffic and growth to Manchester airport but since they prefer to preserve their high-cost base than to grow, Ryanair will now switch/close nine Manchester routes.”

The company had already announced it would be scaling back its winter schedule from Dublin and Stansted.

With thanks to www.theindependent.co.uk for the above information. For more details please refer to their website.