I think it will be kind of interesting if the plan will work as Fraport and Ryanair want it to. Not only, but especially Lufthansa, which is Frankfurts biggest customer seems to be extremely angry since it’s kind of an attack on LH. Even if they start eurowings service at FRA it may lead to losses of profit in the main airline and as some of you may know, LH and EW are quite limited in their options to reduce costs like Ryanair does (especially the employee costs, trying to cut them down will be impossible due to the strikes that will come).
As a consequence of that LH will probably try to attack the Fraport-Ryanair deal, LH’s CEO already considered that the company may only pay landing fees based on the conditions offered to Ryanair.
I know it seems kind of unrealistic that Fraport will allow that and LH won’t have too much options to put pressure on Fraport…what should they do? A lot of maintenance facilities and personnel is based in Frankfurt and their second hub Munich only has a very limited number of slots left as Long as there is no third runway. So a movement is not an option.
I could imagine that LH and also other German airlines like condor or tuifly which are even more in a competition with Ryanair try to sue Fraport for offering only Ryanair high discounts on the landing fees if the deal isn’t stopped by the Ministry of Transport of Hesse since the deal would lead to an unfair competition.
I don’t think that Ryanair would fly to FRA if they had to pay the same fees as everyone else, since the opposite is part of Ryanair’s corporate strategy as it is visible at all the regional airports they fly to. Apart from the landing fees I don’t see too much stopping Ryanair from larger airports as FRA promised them 35 minute turnarounds. Larger airports would help them to get customers willing to fly low cost but unwilling to drive to a remote airport like Hahn, Weeze or Memmingen.
Personally I’m a bit disappointed that Fraport supports a company like Ryanair with Pay2Fly strategies and other exploiting ways to I prove profits. (I have to admit that I don’t like low cost airlines in Europe in general I’d rather choose the LH flight over ab,fr or u2)