Destinations
Ryanair's largest bases include London-Stansted, Dublin, Milan-Bergamo, Brussels-Charleroi, and Alicante. There are non-base airports which serve more destinations than certain base airports. Some of these even have more daily departures than some base airports.
Ryanair prefers to fly to smaller or secondary airports, usually outside of major cities, to help the company cut costs and benefit from lower landing fees. For example, Ryanair does not fly to the main Düsseldorf airport. Instead, it flies to Weeze, 70 km from Düsseldorf. Secondary airports are not always far from the city it serves, and can in fact can be closer than the city's major airport; this is the case at Gothenburg-City and Rome-Ciampino. Ryanair does still serve a number of major airports, including Barcelona, Berlin-Schönefeld, Dublin, Edinburgh, London-Gatwick, and Porto, although the majority of these cities do not have a secondary airport that Ryanair could use as an alternative.
Ryanair flies in a point to point model rather than the more traditional airline hub and spoke model where the passengers have to change aircraft in transit at a major airport, usually being able to reach more destinations this way. Ryanair has 50 European bases. Despite it being an Irish airline, and having a significant presence there, it also has a significant presence in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom as well as many other European countries (although the airline has no bases in France). The United Kingdom is its biggest market, containing the airline's largest base, London-Stansted, and ten others, as well as a total of four other non-base airports.
Ryanair's largest competitor is EasyJet which, unlike Ryanair, has a focus on larger or primary airports and also heavily targets business passengers. Ryanair, in more recent years, has focused on sun destinations such as the Canary Islands and Greece. EasyJet often criticizes Ryanair for its choice of airports and Ryanair often refers to EasyJet as a high fares airline.
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