Talk Quesada forum

Hi, does anyone know when the 'old' Murcia airport closes and the 'new' one takes over?

I'm looking at flights at the moment for January and on the Ryanair site it appears that they are for the old airport. But don't want to book them and find out they are for the new one.

Many thanks.

Officially Jan 15 2019

Ryanair advertising Murcia airport but it is old and new ro catch people out

Ryanair are being very crafty by not showing the airport codes. MJV is the code for San Javier-Murcia. RMU is the code for Region de Murcia International Airport (formerly Murcia-Corvera Airport) According to the Corvera airport web page.

EasyJet are taking bookings for LGW to RMU from 25th March.
Just in time for the Brexit no-deal travel chaos (maybe).

Pete.

Ryanair is still in negotiations with Corvera & will not commit till they get their deal.
https://murciatoday.com/uncertainty-continues-over-ryanair-flights-at-corvera-airport_677329-a.html

Thanks for the replies. I'm booking the tickets for my mother in law so I need to find out what is what.

Ryanair, as normal, have no information on their website and their online 'chat' service is next to useless. From what I can gather, if I book flights then they will be to the Murcia 'region'. But they will not confirm the actual airport. Very frustrating but I suppose it makes sense now why the flights are so cheap!!

To be fair, the authorities in Spain haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory regarding the new airport and its opening date, so I can’t blame Ryanair for being non-commital at this point.

I know a little bit about the processes involved in in getting all the licences and clearances in place to open a new airport, and while some of the high level permits may currently have been granted, there’s much more that will need to be signed-off before passenger services can commence. Many of these will need things like fuel storage and refuelling systems, firefighting equipment an staff, air traffic control systems etc to be fully functional.
This won’t happen until just before the airport is open, as you don’t want aviation fuel siting around for longer than needed and you don’t want firefighters and ATC staff on the payroll for longer than needed.

I think the reality is that even when an airline does sell a ticket for a specific airport, if that airport is having problems then they’ll switch that flight to an alternative airport and give customers the option of a refund if that doesn’t suit them. I take the Easyjet dates with a pintch of salt and accept that it could be a bit of a lottery about which airport you actually end-up flying to during the first 6 months of 2019.

I’ve experienced similar issues when the new airport was opened in Bangkok. Flights switched over from the old airport, then a crack appeared in one of the taxiways at the new airport so it couldn’t cope with the volume of traffic that was scheduled for the airport. They made the decision to switch all domestic flights back to the old airport. A bit of a nightmare if you’d planned to fly in on an international flight then travel on using a domestic flight.

If you want to be virtually 100% certain about which airport you’ll be flying to then I’d suggest booking a flight to Alicante until the new airport has bedded-in and been up and running for a while.

Pete.