Ryanair’s CEO Eddie Wilson has taken a swipe at what he perceives as the inefficiencies and costs associated with regional airports and the organisations behind them.

In an interview with Spanish business paper El Economista, Wilson discussed how the airline plans to remove more aircraft from small airfields from next winter and he also demanded a response from the Spanish government to his request to encourage traffic to underused airports.

“Regional airports are 70% underutilised, so something isn’t working” Wilson said to the reporter.  “Either people don’t want to go to the regions, or airlines don’t want to put planes there, but there is a problem, and Spain must solve it”.

READ: Ryanair vows to appeal court ruling over removal of travel perks for striking pilots

Wilson’s comments come after a row between the airline and AENA, the public entity that operates Spain’s airports. Earlier in the year, AENA announced it was going to increase fees at all airports, with the result that Ryanair chose to cut 800,000 seats flying to and from smaller aerodromes. Meanwhile, the schedule to more established destinations, such as Madrid and Alicante has been expanded.

“Regions need low tariffs to stimulate growth, and they must be accompanied by low costs, because otherwise the formula does not work” said Wilson.

“We retired 800,000 seats this summer because we had better options to allocate that capacity to other locations in Europe. And there will be more cuts in the winter of 2025, and even more in the summer of 2026, because it makes no sense to continue investing in loss-making operations. The rational decision is to move traffic to where access costs are falling, not increasing, so we will continue to do so little by little. We have no plans to invest in regional airports because their pricing structure is broken.”

“The current minister (Óscar Puente) is going to witness a terminal decline of regional airports. I would be happy to sit down with him, but he has already made it clear that he does not want to and that he supports Aena, that he has no plan and uses Ryanair as an excuse. I don’t expect them to accept everything we propose, but at least they could have responded. They didn’t. It’s very sad,”

Wilson went on to explain that the pricing structure meant that popular destinations such as the Balearics, the Canary Islands and Madrid run their airports to capacity, regional locations are sitting largely unused. In his view this is t the determent of both the airlines, and businesses in the regions.

Wilson’s suggestion that fees could be lowered in underserved areas was met with derision by AENA President, Maurici Lucena.  “The modification of fares on a whim of Aena or due to the spurious pressure of an airline would be a serious illegality. I don’t want to think about the face that our secretary general would put on if we proposed something different from what the regulations establish,” he said.