Bournemouth Airport: Jet2 announces 16 new routes from next year

Airline and tour operator Jet2 is to offer flights and package holidays from Bournemouth Airport from next year.

The 16 new routes will start from April 2025 and serve tourist destinations in Turkey, Spain, Portugal and Greece.

It comes after the airport said it expected to see its highest passenger figures this year since 2008.

Ryanair based a second aircraft at the site in 2023 and TUI also plans to add a second plane later in 2024, with an extra 60,000 seats available.

Jet2 said it would base two aircraft at Bournemouth, flying to Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Alicante, Palma (Majorca), Ibiza, Menorca, Antalya, Dalaman, Faro, Madeira, Crete (Heraklion), Corfu, Rhodes and Zante.

It will operate up to 27 weekly flights throughout the summer. The first will depart to Tenerife on 1 April 2025.

More than 100 new jobs will be created initially, with positions available across flight deck, cabin crew, engineering and ground operations, the company said.

CEO Steve Heapy said customers and travel agents had been urging Jet2 to operate from Bournemouth - its 12th UK base - for some time and it anticipated flights would be "enormously popular across the region".

Bournemouth Airport is investing more than £5m in new facilities and staff to cater for an expected increase in passenger numbers.

Planned improvements include an upgraded security search area, with new scanning equipment to relax the restriction on liquids and the need to take electronics out of bags.

A new information desk is also being built, along with improved baggage screening and an extra baggage retrieval area.

Commercial passenger flights from the airport all-but ended during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, with Ryanair resuming flights in December of that year.

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