Budget carrier will offer a total of 32 routes from LJLA in the next few months with new flights to Prague, Sofia, Marrakesh, Girona and Bari. Tony McDonough reports.

Ryanair is starting its summer schedule from Liverpool John Lennon Airport (LJLA) this week with five new destinations.

The budget carrier will offer a total of 32 routes from LJLA in the next few months with new flights to Prague, Sofia, Marrakesh, Girona and Bari.

In addition there will be increased departures each week to Warsaw, Gran Canaria, Palma, Faro, Alicante and Malaga.

Ryanair’s expansion will bring up to an extra 15 departing flights per week and over 200,000 additional seats on sale from Liverpool compared to last year and an expected 11% growth in passenger traffic.

Earlier this week, low-cost airline Wizz Air has started flights from LJLA to the Southern Romanian city of Craiova.

It is Wizz Air’s seventh destination from Liverpool, complementing the airline’s existing flights to Warsaw, Gdansk, Katowice, Riga, Budapest and Lublin.

And last week Blue Air officially launched its latest European base at LJLA.

Liverpool is now Blue Air’s eighth European base and one of the airline’s 189 seat Boeing 737-800 aircraft was flown to Liverpool last week to be based here for summer 2017 to operate the airline’s four new routes to Rome, Milan, Hamburg and Alicante.