Ryanair pushes east with first flights from untapped Ukraine

Ryanair Holdings will extend its network further east than ever before with flights from Ukraine, targeting a market the low-cost giant says has huge pent-up demand while heightening competition with rival Wizz Air Holdings. Services will begin in October with four routes to the Ukrainian capital Kiev and seven to the western city of Lviv, Europe’s biggest discount airline said Wednesday, predicting that the flights will attract 510,000 passengers a year. Ryanair has been expanding into eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union as western markets become increasingly saturated. CCO David O’Brien said Kiev has about three airline passengers a year per head of population compared with 15 in Dublin, where the company is based. “There is a pretty large potential and fewer connections than there should be,” O’Brien said. “Most Ukrainian traffic as far as I can see goes to Istanbul, Frankfurt or Warsaw.” Kiev will get five flights a week from London Stansted, Ryanair’s biggest base, together with three each from Stockholm, Manchester in northern England and Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Lviv will have three weekly services from the Polish cities of Krakow and Wroclaw and two apiece from Stansted, Eindhoven, Berlin, Budapest and Memmingen, 80 km east of Munich. The push into new markets is increasing Ryanair’s overlap with the network of Wizz, eastern Europe’s largest discount operator, though the Budapest-based company closed a separate Ukrainian unit and cancelled many flights there amid a 2015 recession linked to military conflict in the east of the country.<br/>