Charts, Cash and 16 Aircraft: How Ryanair Is Bargaining With Baltic Airports Before Winter

Ryanair is not simply offering the Baltics more flights. It is positioning itself for part of the market being left open as airBaltic restructures and reduces capacity.

From Riga alone, airBaltic’s Winter 2026/27 programme drops Faro, Kittilä, Ljubljana, Malta, Marrakech and Salzburg, while frequencies to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Frankfurt and Tampere are being reduced. The airline also plans to shrink its fleet from 54 aircraft to 36 by the end of 2026.

Ryanair now wants a larger share of that space.

On 17 September, it presented a five-year Baltic growth proposal for up to 16 based aircraft and 11 million annual seats, attaching a headline value of $1.6 billion. Ryanair explicitly linked the offer to airBaltic’s contraction.

But the $1.6 billion needs decoding.

First, count the aircraft

The valuation comes from Ryanair itself.

In Wrocław, the airline will base nine aircraft this winter and describes them as a $900 million investment. In Riga, when it opened its base in 2021, two based aircraft were similarly presented as a $200 million investment.

Ryanair is therefore consistently applying roughly the same valuation:

one based aircraft ≈ $100 million.

That makes the Baltic headline straightforward:

16 aircraft ≈ $1.6 billion.

This is not a commitment to spend $1.6 billion on Baltic terminals or other local fixed assets. It is Ryanair’s own valuation of the aircraft it proposes to base in the region.

And Wrocław gives the number some perspective. One Polish regional airport will have nine Ryanair aircraft this winter. The proposal for all three Baltic states combined is 16.

In March, the aircraft were moving the other way

Ryanair’s Baltic policy has been unusually flexible this year.

In March, it cut planned Summer 2026 capacity in Riga by 20% and dropped six routes, blaming taxes, air-navigation charges and other access costs. Lithuania was offered zero growth, and Tallinn also received no growth.

The message was consistent: where Ryanair considers operating costs too high, aircraft can be moved elsewhere.

Six months later, Riga is the Baltic exception.

According to Ryanair, its Winter 2026 Riga schedule will retain two based aircraft and 16 routes, adding around 40,000 seats, or 6%. The company says Estonia and Lithuania together will lose 550,000 seats, or 25%, and directly credits Riga Airport’s new incentive scheme for the Latvian increase.

The mechanism has therefore already been demonstrated once this year: capacity was cut when Ryanair disliked the economics, and Riga is now getting some of it back after changing its incentive structure.

Ryanair’s version is only one side of the argument

The company describes the Baltic issue in stark terms, saying “high costs kill connectivity” and arguing that lower access costs bring more aircraft and routes. It has also attacked continued state support for what it calls a “zombie airBaltic”. Those are Ryanair’s negotiating claims, not neutral descriptions of Baltic aviation policy.

The airports have their own arguments.

Lithuanian Airports says the Vilnius charge increase challenged by Ryanair and Wizz Air was driven by higher operating costs after charges had remained unchanged since 2018. Lithuania’s Supreme Administrative Court rejected the airlines’ complaints and found the procedure lawful.

Tallinn, meanwhile, is not simply losing connectivity because Ryanair is cutting capacity. Passenger numbers there rose 16% year-on-year in August, with Wizz Air accounting for 18% of passengers after rapid expansion.

That distinction matters. Ryanair can remove seats without necessarily removing the underlying market.

The aircraft can leave

Ryanair nevertheless has one advantage that matters enormously in these negotiations: its aircraft are mobile.

At the Riga press conference, Chief Commercial Officer Jason McGuinness said that even if airBaltic became insolvent, Ryanair would not simply rush additional aircraft into Riga. The airline operates at more than 220 airports, he said, and many of them compete for limited capacity.

That gets to the centre of the issue.

airBaltic cannot move its Riga hub to Wrocław because another airport offers better charges.

Ryanair can move an aircraft.

This does not make Ryanair’s model irrational. Quite the opposite: its willingness to shift capacity toward markets offering better returns is part of a commercially successful strategy.

For Baltic airports, however, it changes the balance of the relationship.

The immediate question is no longer simply whether another carrier can replace seats reduced by airBaltic. Tallinn already shows that other airlines can expand into available demand.

The harder question is on what terms replacement capacity arrives.

As airBaltic reduces its footprint, Ryanair is offering aircraft, routes and millions of seats. But it is simultaneously reminding the Baltics that those aircraft have alternative homes.

That is the real value — and the real price — behind the $1.6 billion headline.