According to several rumors that continue to grow, the Irish low-cost airline intends to withdraw definitively from Morocco, a destination it will no longer serve from next May.
Irish airline Ryanair has doubled its loss forecast for the year due to the impact of the covid-19 variant Omicron, which has led to a sharp reduction in end-of-year holiday bookings. The carrier is now counting on an annual loss of 250 to 450 million euros once morest 100 and 200 million euros initially planned, according to a press release.
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The banning of non-essential travelers for travel from the UK to France and Germany and the suspension of all EU flights from or to Morocco have lowered traffic expectations for December-January of Ryanair from an anticipated range of 10 to 11 million passengers to between 9 and 9.5 million. « The Omicron variant of Covid and recent travel restrictions across Europe have significantly weakened our Christmas and New Years bookings », explained the company in December.
In Morocco, the negative balance of Ryanair does not pass. Relations between Ryanair’s top management and the Moroccan authorities have been very tense since practically the start of the pandemic in the Kingdom in March 2019. The Irish blame Morocco for the successive, and in their eyes unjustified, closures of airspace preventing Ryanair to honor its commitments vis-à-vis the tens of thousands of passengers using its lines.
In mid-December 2021, overwhelmed by a new and umpteenth closure of Moroccan air, Ryanair had decided to suspend its flights to Morocco until February 1. “A lack of clarity and communication from the Moroccan authorities on what to expect beyond their initial decision to ban travel on December 13,” accused the leaders of the low-cost company. who say they deplore heavy losses. For example, Ryanair claims that at the end of November 2021, flight cancellations decided by Morocco had an impact on 160,000 of its customers and that an additional 230,000 passengers are facing disruptions to their travel plans for Morocco. rest of 2021.
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Today, the airline sector is one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, with health restrictions on international travel undermining traffic. If this rupture is confirmed, it will primarily and primarily impact the tourism sector. In this regard, the Moroccan government has just approved yesterday an emergency plan in the amount of 2 billion dirhams in favor of the sector which is suffering enormously from the fallout from the pandemic.