One Baltic Capital Cut Its Fees and Kept Its Flights

Ryanair will grow its Riga Airport schedule by 6% for the winter 2026-27 season, adding about 40,000 seats, keeping two based aircraft and operating 16 routes, with extra frequencies on ten of them including Barcelona and Milan Bergamo. Latvia will be the only Baltic market where the airline grows this winter. In Estonia and Lithuania, capacity falls by 25%. The airline has not left the reasoning to interpretation: Riga reduced its charges through a growth incentive scheme open to any carrier that adds traffic, and Ryanair rewarded it. Tallinn and Vilnius went the other way.

The numbers behind the complaint are specific. Ryanair says Tallinn Airport raised charges by roughly 70% in 2025, while Vilnius charges have climbed almost 30% since 2023. Airports argue that their costs have risen too, and that incentive schemes simply transfer money from the airport’s balance sheet to the airline’s. But Ryanair’s business model is built on moving aircraft to wherever the unit cost is lowest, and the Baltics — three small, adjacent markets with broadly similar demand profiles — make that arbitrage unusually visible. A 25% capacity cut in two countries and a 6% increase in the third is not subtle.

The backdrop is a wider reshuffling of Baltic aviation. Riga’s home carrier airBaltic has been retrenching, including suspending its nonstop Riga-Dubai service for the 2026-27 winter season after assessing regional conditions and possible operational restrictions on the routings it would normally use. That leaves room in Riga that Ryanair is happy to fill, and it partly explains why the Latvian capital was willing to discount access in the first place.

Ryanair has also put a longer proposal on the table: a five-year plan to double its traffic across all three Baltic states to roughly 11 million annual seats, supported by 16 based aircraft and what it values at about USD 1.6 billion in aircraft investment, plus several thousand jobs. The offer is explicitly conditional on lower access costs. Whether Tallinn and Vilnius treat that as a partnership or as a hostage negotiation will decide how many nonstop options Estonians and Lithuanians have next winter.

Sources: Aviation Week, Airways Magazine