Aena Fires Back At Ryanair, Describes The Airline’s Statements As Conflicting With Reality
The Spanish company, managing the country's airports, did not hold back against Ryanair in a beef over €0.68 ($0.79).
After Ryanair had announced that, following Aena’s decision to increase airport charges across Spain, it would pull up to 1 million seats from the country’s regional airports, the Spanish company fired back, calling the airline’s statements as being “in permanent and deliberate conflict with objective facts and truthfulness.”
On September 3, 2025, shortly after Ryanair published its plans to remove capacity from regional airports across Spain, including the closure of a base and removal of all flights from/to others, Aena, the state-owned company that manages airports across Spain, issued its own public response.
And it was quite inflammatory, to say the least.
According to Maurici Lucena, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Aena, in modern times, it would be difficult to come across a company such as Ryanair, “where the dissonance between a company’s operational excellence and the dishonesty of its communications policy is so striking.”
"Ryanair's impertinence and uninhibited public demands on democratic governments in countries where it operates its flights with the aim of obtaining economic advantages, shed light upon two deep-rooted and unedifying characteristics of this airline company.”
First, the Irish low-cost carrier has had a “disturbingly plutocratic idea of the political system,” with constant efforts to intimidate by removing flights from airports, regions, or countries, calls for the resignations of ministers and public officials, mocking politicians, and calls for laws to be changed in its favor. Secondly, its communication and lobbying policies have been in “permanent and deliberate conflict with objective facts and truthfulness.”
Lucena highlighted that while Ryanair has called its plans to increase airport charges across Spain "excessive and uncompetitive,” they are increasing by only €0.68 ($0.79) in 2026. “Everyone knows that a person's decision of whether to take a plane or not does not depend on whether the ticket will cost 68 cents more next year, yet Ryanair insists again and again to the contrary, while it has itself brazenly raised its air fares in the last year by an average of 21%!”
Rytis
To illustrate the fact that Ryanair has continuously threatened and used public statements “for short-term financial gain at the expense of taxpayers' money and the long-term sustainability of the airport system,” Aena has compiled a 66-page dossier.
The dossier includes statements, letters, and headlines of Ryanair’s threats and announced region-specific capacity cuts throughout Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom in 2024 and 2025.
"Although Ryanair constantly denies it, Aena's airport charges are generally among the most competitive within Europe, thanks to a highly demanding regulation which, amongst other factors, leads to a high operational efficiency of the company,” Lucena said.
Lucena stated that, while Ryanair claims it is removing or reducing capacity from the nine Spanish regional airports due to higher costs, the reality is that the carrier "is transferring its aircraft to airports where it can set higher prices for its airline tickets and thus earn more money, such as at large Spanish airports,” where charges are even higher compared to the country’s regional airports.
“Another proof of Ryanair’s real priorities and those of its executives is the stratospheric bonus of over 100 million euros! [$116 million – ed. note] to be earned by Ryanair Group CEO Michael O'Leary based on the achievement of a series of targets and his staying on in the company.”
Aena’s chief executive concluded that Spain, where tourism and air transport are some of the main engines of its economy, cannot “design and formulate its airport system according to the spurious and selfish interests of a single airline.”
Cirium’s Diio Mi showed that Ryanair, which includes flights operated or marketed by its subsidiaries, such as Ryanair UK, has scheduled 5.4% more weekly flights and 5.2% more weekly departing seats from Spain year-on-year (YoY) in November. In January 2026, the carrier’s planned schedules showed a YoY growth of 22.9% and 22.6% in weekly departures and weekly departing seats from the country, respectively.
