Ryanair to fly to Pardubice

Discount air carrier Ryanair announced new routes including Pardubice to London Stansted, which will fly three times a week starting in October. The carrier also announced increased service on its Prague to London Stansted route, as well as increased service on Bratislava and Budapest routes.

Pardubice is becoming the fourth Czech city served by Ryanair. Aside from Prague and Pardubice, there is also service to Brno and Ostrava.

“We are pleased to launch our biggest-ever London winter schedule, with nine new London Stansted winter routes and extra flights on 13 existing routes, which will deliver 23.8 million customers per annum and support over 17,000 jobs at Ryanair's three London airports. We are also pleased to report record bookings on our London summer 2017 schedule, and customers can look forward to even lower fares,” Ryanair's Kenny Jacobs said, adding that special fares were available until Feb. 27 at www.ryanair.com. Tickets for the Pardubice route are not yet on sale.

Some 50,000 people per year are expected to use the Pardubice route, according to Denis Barabas, Ryaniar sales director for the CEE region.

Flight service fees are lower at Pardubice, and there is frequent train service between Pardubice and Prague on Czech Railways, RegioJet and Leo Express. The two cities are 96 kilometers apart. Pardubice also has a small number of it own tourist attractions including a chateau and a historical center with the Green Tower and other buildings, but it is not a major tourist destination.

Pardubice Airport had been handling a lot of flights from Russia, but demand for those routes has dropped significantly in the past few years. The airport handled a record 184,140 passengers in 2013, but that dropped to just 59,260 in 2015.

The new Ryanair route will be a big boost for the small airport, which mainly handles charter flights.

It was a former military airport and it started serving civil aircraft in 1995. A new terminal should open at the airport in the last quarter of 2017.

Ryanair now has 124 routes and 1,100 weekly flights from London Stansted as well as a small number of routes from London Gatwick and London Luton. Ryanair is an Irish low-cost airline headquartered in Swords, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, with its primary operational bases at Dublin and London Stansted Airports. In 2016, the carrier was the largest European airline by scheduled passengers carried, and the busiest international airline by passenger numbers.

Oddly, the Pardubice to London route was first mentioned in 2014 on a discount ticket site, but it was later revealed to be an April Fools joke, though many of the details have now proven to be true.