Nine New easyJet Routes, Five at Transavia: France's Regions Rearm
Airlines switch to their winter schedules on 25 October 2026, and this year the switch is a busy one. Two carriers have made their moves from French regional airports, with announcements precise enough to draw concrete conclusions about fares in the months ahead.
easyJet Opens Nine Routes
easyJet has announced nine autumn openings: Nice–Cairo, Nice–Lyon, Bordeaux–Agadir, Bordeaux–Málaga, Bordeaux–Gran Canaria, Nantes–Essaouira, Nantes–Brussels Zaventem, Paris-CDG–Cairo and Paris–Southampton. The Lyon–Nice route starts on 26 October, with two weekly rotations on Mondays and Fridays and headline fares announced at around €40.
Two signals stand out. First, the weight of Morocco and Egypt: Agadir, Essaouira and Cairo, the latter served from two different airports. Second, the return of short domestic and cross-border routes — Lyon–Nice, Nantes–Brussels — that low-cost carriers had largely abandoned.
Transavia Consolidates Its Regional Network
Transavia is opening five international routes from Bordeaux, Nantes, Brest and Rennes, serving Cairo, Seville and Cape Verde (São Vicente). The first flights depart on 25 October, with fares announced from €42. The format is deliberately lean: one to two rotations per week, with no connections.
This package adds to ten openings for summer 2026 and six more in January. The airline is methodically building a self-sufficient regional network whose main appeal for travellers in western France is simple: no more transiting through Paris — one segment fewer, one connection fewer, one less thing to go wrong.
Meanwhile, Ryanair Is Pulling Seats by the Million
The picture would be misleading if we only looked at openings. Over the same winter, Ryanair is making withdrawals on an entirely different scale, and the airline explicitly blames airport charges for them.
Greece and Spain: The Heaviest Cuts
In Greece, Ryanair is closing its Thessaloniki base for winter 2026: three aircraft withdrawn, around ten routes closed and on the order of 500,000 seats removed. The carrier is also leaving Cretan airports. In Spain, the reduction covers roughly 1.2 million seats across the regional network, with flights to Asturias and Vigo stopping entirely, the Santiago de Compostela base closing and Tenerife North dropped.
France and Belgium
In France, Clermont-Ferrand Auvergne loses its Ryanair routes to Porto, London Stansted and Fez, with closure scheduled for 27 March 2026. In Belgium, five aircraft are leaving Charleroi and roughly two million seats disappear across winter 2026-2027 and summer 2027, affecting Milan-Bergamo, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rome-Ciampino, Kraków and Mallorca among others.
The lesson is mechanical: when one operator pulls hundreds of thousands of seats out of a regional market, those who remain have no reason to keep undercutting each other on the same routes.
Orly Down a Runway Until 17 December
On top of this commercial reshuffle comes a physical constraint. Runway 4 at Paris-Orly is closed from 10 August to 17 December 2026 for resurfacing and taxiway reconfiguration work. The estimate circulating in the industry points to around 3,000 flights liable to be cancelled, rescheduled or shifted to Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle.
Who Is Exposed
The most affected carriers are Transavia, easyJet and Vueling — Transavia having held a central position at the airport since taking over Air France's domestic routes on 29 March 2026. The works window falls across the three busiest moments of the second half of the year: the late-August returns, the All Saints' holidays and the first Christmas departures in mid-December.
In practice, if you are flying from Orly this autumn, two habits help: check your departure airport the day before, not the day itself, since a switch to CDG changes your entire ground journey; and leave margin on onward land connections. The week of 15 August already gave a taste of how fragile the system is, with an easyJet France cabin crew strike and around a hundred flights cancelled over the weekend.
What This Tells Us About Fares
Targeted openings on one side, mass withdrawals on the other: the market is not falling uniformly, it is fragmenting.
Fuel Explains Part of the Gap
Ryanair and easyJet hedged a large share of their fuel consumption in advance — around 84% according to published figures — at levels below current prices. That gives them pricing headroom which less-hedged carriers lack, and explains why some groups are cutting capacity more aggressively than others. IATA, for its part, does not expect fares to normalise before autumn 2026 at the earliest, and then through gradual adjustment rather than any sharp drop.
Where Low Fares Survive
Headline autumn-winter prices remain low on newly opened routes: easyJet is showing one-way fares under €40 to several European destinations, with entry points around €24 and examples such as Portugal at roughly €31 in October or Prague at roughly €35 in November. These are launch fares, designed to fill aircraft on routes with no track record.
Hence the practical rule: this autumn's bargains are on the new routes, not the established ones. On an older route a competitor has just abandoned, waiting achieves nothing — supply has shrunk. On a route opening on 25 or 26 October, the airline needs you.
Planning a Family Trip This Autumn
Three simple trade-offs follow. Book early on corridors where an operator has withdrawn, particularly to regional Spain and northern Greece, where remaining seats thin out as winter approaches. Take regional departures seriously: a direct Nantes or Bordeaux service to Morocco, even at two rotations a week, removes the Paris connection — and with it the main source of fatigue and delay on a family journey.
Finally, accept the frequency constraint. A route with two weekly flights imposes rigid dates and leaves little room to manoeuvre if a flight is cancelled: on that kind of rotation, cancellation cover and a spare day before any firm commitment on the ground are not luxuries. That is the price of a regional network that is, genuinely, growing.