September the 7th, 2025 – The wildly popular Ryanair is scrapping 11 Zagreb flights soon, but there’s great news as a result of issues in Spain.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Sinisa Malus writes, low-cost airline Ryanair will reduce the number of flights between Zagreb and several other European cities during the upcoming winter season. Due to lower interest in travel to some destinations, Ryanair will scrap a total of 11 Zagreb flights.

ryanair to scrap 11 zagreb flights this winter

The last flight to the Greek island of Kos from Zagreb is scheduled for September the 30th, and three days earlier, on September the 27th, Ryanair will stop flying to the French city of Marseille. The Greek island of Corfu will be connected to Zagreb until October the 23rd, while flights to Girona near Barcelona, ​​Malmö in Sweden and Naples in Italy will be available until October the 24th. Palma de Mallorca will be connected to Zagreb until October the 29th, the same applies to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Just one day later, on October the 30th, flights to Manchester in England, Oslo in Norway and Palermo in Sicily will also cease.

Some great news however comes in the form of an announcement that Ryanair will cut a million seats in the Spanish market this winter in response to what it calls “shameless” fee increases announced by airport operator Aena. Aena’s chief executive, Mauricio Lucena, responded by accusing Ryanair of “selfishness,” “rudeness,” “blackmail” and “greed,” and the long-running conflict between Spain’s largest airline by passenger numbers and the operator of most of the country’s commercial airports has worsened this summer, reports Ex-Yu Aviation News.

ryanair will shift its spanish capacities to croatia

Ryanair, unphased, has once again confirmed that it will shift capacity from the Spanish market to Croatia. However, the carrier has yet to reveal its new routes from Croatia for the upcoming winter 2025/26 season or the summer 2026 schedule. Over the past month, Ryanair officials have visited Zagreb and Dubrovnik, following earlier visits to Rijeka this summer.

For the upcoming winter 2025/2026 season, which runs from the 26th of October to the 28th of March, the airline has planned 690,282 seats on the Croatian market. This is an increase of 9.4 percent compared to last winter, representative of an additional 59,070 seats. This significant growth is mainly driven by increasing the frequency of flights on existing routes. Next year, Ryanair will enter its fifth and final year of the growth incentive model from which it benefited at its popular Zagreb Airport base. To maintain its incentives, the airline must add at least 75,000 departing passengers during the year, with the possibility of further discounts if it exceeds 150,000 additional departing passengers per year.

This in itself gives Ryanair a strong incentive to increase its traffic from the Croatian capital’s airport each year. Ryanair’s proposal to reduce its operations in Spain due to a 6.5 percent fee increase announced by Aena for 2026 will result in the closure of its bases at Valladolid and Jerez airports.

The low-cost carrier said it would reduce capacity at regional airports on the Iberian peninsula by 600,000 seats and on the Canary Islands by 400,000 seats between the end of October and the end of March. That’s as much as 16 percent of traffic at regional airports.

dubrovnik airport is also benefited greatly by ryanair

Apart from Zagreb, Ryanair brings the most flights to Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik Airport accepted and transported 543,733 passengers in August this year, almost 13,000 more than in the same month last year and almost three thousand more passengers than in July this year.

Ryanair was the second largest carrier in Dubrovnik last summer with 54 flights on nine routes, but this year it has taken the top spot with 62 flights on 21 routes. Last year, Dubrovnik Airport had 2.96 million passengers, and this year it will have more than 3.1 million passengers, which places it in fifth place among regional airports.


 


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