Ryanair have announced new flights to Lanzarote from Ireland, and Aer Lingus are putting on extra flights too - good news for Irish tourists considering Lanzarote holidays.

Ryanair’s well known Michael O’Leary also criticised Irish airport taxes, saying it costs the country more than the revenue raised - a valid point often overlooked when airport taxes are introduced and then inevitabily increased over the years.

Here is an extract of how the Irish Times reported the story (for the full article click here):

THE GOVERNMENT is losing more in VAT it would receive from growing passenger numbers than the €70 million the exchequer gets from the €10 travel tax, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary claimed yesterday.

He said the travel tax resulted in the State losing around four million tourists last year. A further three million visitors would be lost this year.

Mr O’Leary was speaking in Cork where he was announcing details of seven new summer services to Bordeaux and La Rochelle in France, Alicante, Barcelona, and Malaga in Spain, Faro in Portugal and Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.

He said the new services would be on average 40 per cent cheaper than similar services offered by Aer Lingus, and were due in part to Aer Lingus’s higher fares and in part to Budget Travel’s demise and the drop in charter capacity.

However, Ryanair’s announcement was matched by Aer Lingus, who yesterday launched what it described as its “largest ever summer programme at Cork”, announcing an extra 44 flights per week to bring weekly departures to the UK and Europe to 140.

Some 22 routes will be served directly from Cork, including Alicante, Barcelona, Faro, Lanzarote, Malaga and Nice. Eight routes are being added with new services to Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Jersey, La Rochelle, Gatwick and Tenerife.

More details about Lanzarote, including both Lanzarote flights and a map of Lanzarote are available with yourlanzarote.net