Ryanair’s Dara Brady spoke with the ECHO as the airline announced a major investment in Liverpool
Ryanair’s CMO Dara Brady and Liverpool John Lennon Airport’s CEO John Irving
The Ryanair team has said the people of Liverpool “can’t get enough” of the airline as it announces a raft of new routes from Liverpool John Lennon Airport. Today, Thursday, September 24, the company announced it will base a sixth aircraft at the airport for Winter 2026, representing a US$600 million (£453 million) investment in the Northwest.
The additional aircraft will bring more than 100,000 extra seats to Liverpool and support six new routes to Milan Bergamo, Copenhagen, Gdansk, Porto, Tirana and Warsaw.
Ryanair will also increase the frequency of flights on three popular existing routes to Krakow, Kaunas and Cork. The ECHO caught up with Ryanair’s CMO, Dara Brady, at the South Liverpool airport to find out more about the investment.
Dara told the ECHO: “We’ve been operating here since 1988, and we have a great relationship with the airport. They work incredibly hard to keep costs down despite the government’s best efforts to drive up the costs by introducing double taxation on passengers.
“The airport does a great job here in Liverpool, and the people of the North West, Liverpool, and the surrounding areas love low fares and can’t get enough of them. We are happy to continue to support that and keep growing here.”
To celebrate Ryanair’s sixth aircraft and new routes at Liverpool in Winter 2026, the airline has launched a limited-time seat sale with fares from £29.99 available only at Ryanair.com.
He added: “While Ryanair is growing at Liverpool, other regional airports across the UK are being hamstrung by the decision to increase APD.”
UK Air Passenger Duty (APD) is an excise duty levied on flights departing from UK airports, based on the distance of your destination and your class of travel.
Dara continued: “If the UK Government is serious about delivering growth, they should abolish this penal and damaging APD tax, which makes the UK, particularly regional airports, uncompetitive compared to EU countries like Sweden, Hungary, Slovakia, and regional Italy, which are abolishing aviation taxes and lowering access costs to stimulate traffic, tourism, and jobs growth.
“The UK has gone the wrong way by raising APD to £15 per passenger, and now the Labour Govt proposes to ‘double tax’ visitors by allowing Regional Mayors to levy a tax on hotel overnights.
“Ryanair has already submitted plans to the Labour Government to grow UK traffic by 27% to 80M passengers by 2030, but this growth can only be delivered if the Government abolishes its damaging and penal APD tax, which is now the highest in Europe.”
