Irish low-cost airline Ryanair will operate 19 routes from Zagreb as part of its winter flight schedule, including a new one to the Canary Islands, Chief Commercial Officer Jason McGuinness announced at a press conference on Tuesday.

McGuinness said that transport volume is recovering after the COVID-19 pandemic and that during the winter flight schedule Ryanair will have three aircraft in Zagreb.

The company expects to have five to six aircraft in Zagreb in a few years’ time and fly five million passengers a year.

McGuinness said that in Zagreb Ryanair supports over a thousand jobs indirectly and 90 directly (pilots, cabin crew, engineers).

In the fiscal year from April 2022 to March 2023, Ryanair flew 1.2 million passengers to and from Zagreb, which is 22% more than in the previous fiscal year, and similar growth is expected in the current year.

The top three destinations to which Ryanair flies from Zagreb are London Stansted, Bergamo and Dublin. McGuinness announced an increase in the number of flights on the existing routes to Basel, Dublin, Gothenburg, Malaga, Malta, Memmingen and Paris Beauvais.

Although it has been announced as a possibility, Ryanair will not be flying to Zadar this winter.

In the current fiscal year, the company expects to reach three million passengers for Croatia.