This week, Idedicated a post to the story of an airport willing to slam the door in Ryanair’s face: Angoulême Airport. The airport decided to reject Ryanair’s attempt to raise its fees.

As the Irish Times reported two weeks ago in an interesting article, Michel Boutant, a French representative, did not accept the way Ryanair tried to negotiate a better deal. To block what he named Ryanair’s financial blackmail, Boutant has called for the creation of a common front against Ryanair and asked other regional airports to not give in to the airline’s demands, saying it was adept at playing the “competition card” by threatening to move its services elsewhere.

Boutant guessed right… At the same time, Ryanair sent a request to Pau Airport (a French city located in the southwest of France). This time, Ryanair asked to quadruple subsidies on the route, to €1.4 million, and threatened to move out its services.

Did the French Regional airport spread the word?

Yesterday, the news came from Italy. Alghero Airport (Sardinia, Italy) announced that Ryanair is to stops all its flight. In the Ryanair PR press release the following was stated:

“Unfortunately the lack of support on the part of the local administration and the airport for Ryanair’s growth in Alghero has led to the cancellation of seven Ryanair services”

What I immediately understood when I read Ryanair’s PR release is that Alghero refused to give millions of euros without any guarantee or any compensation. Just as Angouleme Airport did.

According to a web site, other Italian airports are going to make public Ryanair’s methods to try and put a stop to low cost airlines using public money to be able to offer low fares.

In France, a survey estimates that Ryanair received around 35 millions euros in public grants in 2008 (almost 10% of Ryanair’s profits in 2008).  A French union talks about 650M€ for Europe, but figures have not yet been released. It is therefore very hard to estimate how much public grant money Ryanair could have received over the past few years. But day after day, all across Europe, this kind of news seems to indicate that public money is a major part of Ryanair’s revenue.