September 1 (SeeNews) - Irish low-cost air carrier Ryanair announced on Thursday it expects to transport 1.9 million passengers to and from Romania during the fiscal year ending March 2017.
Ryanair carried some 620,000 passengers to and from Romania in 2015.
The air carrier will include in its summer schedule already existing routes to Germany's Berlin, UK's Bristol and Romania's western city of Timisoara, it said in a press release.
In total, Ryanair will operate 104 weekly flights next summer, on 13 different routes.
In August, Ryanair said it will launch a new route from Romania's capital Bucharest to Palermo in Italy, starting March 28, 2017.
Ryanair also plans to increase the number of weekly flights from Bucharest to Brussels to nine, to five for Ireland's Dublin and to fly daily to Italy's Milan.
Currently, the low cost carrier operates a total of 12 routes from Bucharest.
Ryanair has solid expansion plans for Romania as it will open its first base in the western city of Timisoara in November and a second one at the Bucharest international airport Henri Coanda in October.
The company will allocate one airplane worth $100 million to the Timisoara base and three Boeing aircraft worth $300 million to the Bucharest base.
Elsewhere in southeast Europe, the Irish carrier plans to open a base in the Bulgarian capital Sofia at the beginning of September, allocating to it three new aircraft worth $300 million. The base will service flights to 22 destinations.
It has also announced several new flights from Serbia's second largest city of Nis.
($=0.8975 euro)