Ryanair lands to El Prat Airport (Barcelona)

From yesterday the Irish airline Ryanair will be launching flights from El Prat airport, where it will be operating a total of 20 routes, establishing a base with five planes and employing 350 people, with an investment of 350 million dollars, about 284 million euros.

Ryanair lands in Barcelona

Ryanair will be connecting El Prat to airports at Brussels (Charleroi), Cagliari, Dublin, Düsseldorf (Weeze), Edinburgh, Oslo (Rygge), Paris (Beauvais), Rome (Ciampino), Venice (Treviso) and Milan (Bergamo).

The Spanish airports Ryanair will be linking to Barcelona are Palma, Gran Canaria, Ibiza, Lanzarote, Malaga, Santander, Santiago, Seville, Tenerife and Valencia.

Ryanair expects to carry some two million passengers to El Prat by the end of the first year, creating some 2.000 jobs. Barcelona airport, where it will use the T-2 terminal, will be its 42nd base in the world and the sixth in Spain.

To celebrate the announcement of its El Prat base, Ryanair offered over a million tickets for sale at 5 euros to travel on over 500 European routes.

The new T1 in El Prat Barcelona Airport.

T1

Yesterday, 17 June, Spanair was the first company to operate out of El Prat de Llobregat airport’s new Terminal 1, the T1 inaugurated the 6am flight to Madrid while the first intercontinental flight was the Barcelona-Singapore route operated by Singapore Airlines.

A total of 19 airlines opened the T1, these include Spanair, Lufthansa, TAP Portugal, Swiss, SAS Scandinavian Airlines, US Airways, Egyptair and Singapore Airlines. During its first working day, the T1 has 240 operations scheduled which will bring over 30,000 passengers to the airport. The new building aimed at consolidating Barcelona as the benchmark airport in southern Europe and the Mediterranean area, comes into operation.

This will mark the start of a new stage in the life of the airport, bringing various changes with it. On the one hand, it will switch to two terminals, the new T1 and T2, which will include the old A, B and C terminals.

As for access, there will be a shuttle bus every seven minutes to connect the two terminals, as well as a bus service between the Renfe train station and the T1 terminal. As for cars, the main entrance way will be from the C-31 motorway, and there will be 11,000 parking places available.

When the T1 is completely operational, the Star Alliance will represent 30% of the 24 million expected passengers. Through the two terminals, the airport will have an overall capacity of 55 million passengers.

In addition to these companies, other companies are expected to move to the T1 terminal towards the end of September, including One World (Iberia and Vueling), followed by SkyTeam (incorporating Air Europa) towards the end of 2009.

More info in AENA website: www.aena.es

The new T1 in the Barcelona Airport

Núñez i Navarro Hotels: www.nnhotels.com