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As the aviation industry waits to see what the travel restrictions will be in place this summer, easyJet has announced significant expansion at Birmingham.
The West Midlands airport, which was hit hard by the collapses of Monarch, Thomas Cook and Flybe, has gained five summer holiday links to southern Europe with Britain’s biggest budget airline.
Starting on 29 June easyJet intends to connect Birmingham with the key Iberian holiday airports: Alicante, Malaga and Palma in Spain and Faro in Portugal. Corfu in Greece will also be a new easyJet route.
Initial frequencies are low: twice a week to Corfu and Malaga, and thrice weekly to the other destinations.
Ali Gayward, easyJet’s UK country manager, said: “We’ve kept our fleet in a flight-ready mode so we are ready and able to ramp up our services quickly and increase our capacity where we see increased demand for the summer.”
At present all overseas holidays from the UK are illegal. The earliest international leisure travel could resume is 17 May, and the prime minister is expected to outline plans on Easter Monday for how foreign journeys could be opened up.
Ms Gayward said: “We remain of the view that international travel can restart and that, with the right framework in place, restrictions can be safely and progressively reduced and in some cases removed by midsummer for key destinations.”
Nick Barton, the airport’s chief executive Birmingham Airport, said: “These additional sunshine routes demonstrate the strong demand in the region for both business and leisure travel and the carrier’s commitment to serving the Midlands.”
The airline schedule analyst Sean Moulton said: “easyJet has long left the Midlands to its rivals, but has now decided to join the market. All five routes have direct competition with other airlines including Jet2, Ryanair and Tui.
“But easyJet is very well known in the UK and these five routes are to very popular tourist destinations.”
While easyJet already has a presence at Birmingham, it does not serve Mediterranean destinations. The current network is to three UK cities – Belfast, Edinburgh and Glasgow – as well as Amsterdam and Geneva.
Last month Wizz Air announced a link from Birmingham to Larnaca, the main airport in Cyprus, while Ryanair will fly from the West Midlands airport to the Greek island of Rhodes and the city of Poznan in western Poland.
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