Ryanair plans to transport more customers in Romania than TAROM in 3-4 years (I hope they will start flying from Iasi soon)

I just read an interview with Tomasz Kulakowski, Ryanair's sales manager for Central Europe in www.standard.ro.

Their plans are ambitious. They plan to transport 80.000 passengers in 2008 from the 2 Romanian airports that they are already present on: Arad and Constanta. And in 3-4 years they plan to reach at least 1 million passengers per year.

I already said that Iasi has no touristic strategy and it would be excellent if Ryanair would start to operate from Iasi. They chose Arad and Constanta mainly because of the low airport taxes that they managed to obtain from the airports. I think this would be a good strategy for Iasi airport also. Just offer low airport taxes to Ryanair and let them bring in foreign people to Iasi. Last year we only had 22.000 foreign tourists in Iasi. Ryanair plans to transport 40.000 passengers to Arad and Constanta, most of them are likely to be Italian citizens that will spend a lot of money in these cities. Just imagine what this would mean for the tourism in Iasi. Doubling the number of foreign tourists in the first year! If I would run for mayor in Iasi I would make an objective of my term to bring Ryanair in Iasi and save the tourism in Iasi!

I hope that Ryanair is already negotiating with the Iasi International Airport. I think it's obvious that the first routes will be to Italy. But hopefully we'll get lucky and Ryanair will also operate some other routes from Iasi. Some good options would be Bruxelles, Dusseldorf or Vienna.

Tomasz also explains some of the strategies Ryanair uses to keep it's prices so low. They only have 5000 employees. And they plan to transport 60 million passengers this year. This means 12.000 passengers per employee. Lufthansa has 93.500 employees and they also plan to transport almost 60 million passengers. But this means only a little bit more than 570 passengers per employee.