Ryanair will thin its winter flights from Cardiff Airport to Dublin and Alicante, as the budget giant cuts around two million seats across Europe to reduce its exposure to sky-high fuel prices.
The airline cut its passenger forecast for the year to March 2027 from 216 million to 214 million in a market update on Wednesday, concentrating the reductions on the loss-making winter months.
“It is sensible to strategically reduce the group’s exposure to unhedged jet fuel during the unprofitable winter schedule,” the airline said, adding it expects the one-off cut to trim its winter losses by €70m to €100m, around £60m to £86m.
Ryanair has locked in 80 per cent of this year’s fuel at around 67 dollars a barrel, but jet fuel is trading near double that, driven by the conflict in the Middle East.
The airline has not published a route-by-route list of what goes. But analysis by the Cardiff Airport News and Information group, which tracks schedules at the Welsh airport, has identified the Cardiff flights dropping out of the booking system.
Dublin goes from five flights a week to four for three weeks in January 2027, with services on 9, 16 and 23 January no longer bookable, six flights in all, before the route steps back up to daily from 18 March.
Alicante loses twelve flights, dropping from three a week to two for two weeks in December and four in January, with 5 and 12 December and 9, 16, 23 and 30 January gone, though the route otherwise stays bookable three times a week until the end of March.
That puts Cardiff among the most lightly touched of the 16 UK airports the group found affected, with its analysis counting more than 700 flights cut at Birmingham, more than 500 at Bristol and 134 at Edinburgh in January alone.
The trim still lands on a winter Spanish schedule thinner than last year’s, after Vueling pulled both its Cardiff routes, Alicante and Malaga, for the season.
When Vueling went, the airport pointed booked passengers to TUI and Ryanair, who both keep flying to Alicante from Cardiff this winter, a reassurance that now carries a few gaps in the calendar.
The cuts also land on an airport in its best run for years, with passenger numbers up 16 per cent this spring, among the largest proportional growth in the UK.
Ryanair’s warning is about next summer. If oil stays high, it says European short-haul fares “will increase materially”, with weaker-hedged rivals struggling “to maintain capacity or even survive this coming winter”.
The group’s schedule-watchers note Ryanair is not alone, with easyJet, British Airways, Aer Lingus, Vueling and Loganair all having made trims of their own.
Anyone booked on a cancelled flight is entitled to a full refund or a free move to another service under air passenger rights rules, with Ryanair contacting affected customers directly.
What happens next rests on the oil price and the summer 2027 schedule, which Ryanair has yet to release, and Cardiff’s route team will be in Frankfurt next month meeting airlines about new services.
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