Plenty of news about our friends Ryanair.

Despite their difficulties with court cases with the European Union about
state aid, (whether Ryanair received unfair state subsidies at its Belgian hub
of Charleroi) Ryanair has announced two new European bases in Rome and
Barcelona. The new bases would start from January 28 and February 5 2004
respectively, adding 12 routes to its rapidly expanding network.

And the bad news: Ryanair is to close all its recently-opened intra-Nordic
routes due to weak demand and switch capacity to destinations outside the
region. They plan to end flights from Sweden’s Skavsta to Oslo in
Norway, Tampere in Finland and Arhus in Denmark from January 14 2004.
Ryanair added in a statement it was also shutting its flights from London
to Ostend in Belgium, Maastricht in the Netherlands and to the French
destinations of Reims and Clermont.

The good news: new routes will be from London Stansted to Linz in Austria,
Bari in Italy, Erfurt in Germany, Jerez in Spain, and from France’s
Charleroi to Calladolid in Spain.

You really wanted to know this, didn’t you: you can now buy Ryanair
gift vouchers: for more info, see: http://www.ryanairvouchers.com/They say
you can choose from 135 routes across 16 different countries (does that include
flying into the wrong country – Beetle?) and that for every voucher
bought Ryanair will make a £1/€1 donation to charity