Ranking Europe's "domestic" airlines

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The top-ten largest intra-Europe airlines

We use the term “domestic” lightly. Much like Canada is sometimes included in domestic numbers for the North American airlines (not my decision, Canada), for lack of a better option, we’re calling all of Europe “domestic.”

This analysis considers all flying between airports within the European continent—not continental Europe — the geographic continent. Brexit or no Brexit, the UK is in.

Great. With that out of the way, who is most serving Europe from Europe?

The race to fly Europeans within Europe has been contentious over the past two decades. Once dominated by the large legacy airlines, Europe has followed, nay… led the world into the ULCC revolution.

The general flow of the above chart is blue lines up and to the right (ULCC) and yellow lines down and to the right (Legacy network) – except for one very notable exception.

A network airline has bucked the trend and moved into third place by the end of 2023. The ranking is calculated by number of scheduled seats departing and arriving within Europe each year. It was important to consider annual numbers, since seasonality is such a strong force for those flying within Europe, particularly for the low-cost airlines.

Which brings us to the notable exception – number three. We’re not going to tell you who it is for the sake of fake internet suspense, but you can find the answer below. This airline has been changing things, and not only within Europe.

We’ve mentioned this airline in our newsletter and analyses below, but not from the intra-Europe context. But fear not, for this is not a long analysis and you won’t need to wait long.

Which is the third-largest intra-Europe mystery airline?