Morocco: The LCCs
and Royal Air Maroc Sep/Oct 2025

This year about 19m tourists are expected to visit Morocco, a record and about 46% above prepandemic 2019. Official policy is to attract 26m tourists by 2030, a key date as this is when Morocco will co-host the football World Cup along with Spain and Portugal. Politicians are generally over-optimistic about the short-term costs and long-term benefits of one-off events like the World Cup or the Olympics. But Morocco does have an established long term tourism strategy, with the aim of ultimately making the country one of the top ten global tourist destinations with 36m visitors (for comparison, Spain has about 95m visitors a year).

Under King Mohammed VI, a relatively enlightened but still absolute monarch, Morocco has adopted of policy of modernising the economy over the past 20 years. A recent high-profile gain was the decision by Safran to locate a new assembly line for LEAP aeroengines in Casablanca, following the completion of a MRO facility there.

Despite such successes, all is not well in the Kingdom. This year has seen widespread protests by Gen Z (born 1997-2012, the first internet generation) which has led to suppression and some deaths. The protests are about lack of prospects, inequality, corruption, and money wasted on grandiose projects. Morocco is very close geographically to the EU but economically still very far. Spain lies just 12km to the north across the Strait of Gibraltar (in fact, Morocco shares a land border with the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa), but GDP per capita in Morocco is €4,400 whereas it is about €35,000 in Spain.

Enlightened liberalisation and the LCC invasion

Opening up the country to tourism has been the main strand of the modernisation policy of the Moroccan government. Following a 2003 World Bank report which recommended air transport liberalisation and also highlighted the growing importance of European LCCs in delivering tourism (and which incidentally was co-authored by Aviation Strategy consultants), Morocco made a genuinely radical move in signing an Open Skies agreement with the EU in 2006, which, when fully implemented in 2018, meant that Morocco became part of the EU commercial air transport market, in the process exposing the national carrier to new intense competition.

Previously the Morocco-Europe market had been dominated by a duopoly of Air France and Royal Air Maroc (RAM, pronounced la raum). Services to/from French regional cities and Morocco were divided up between the two carriers, while in the Parisian market Air France flights went to CDG and RAM operated to Orly.

Although France remains the most important tourism and business market for Morocco, and Casablanca-Paris is still by far the most important city-pair, RAM has thrown off its colonial dependence on Air France. Notably, in 2020 RAM joined the oneworld global alliance rather than allying with France-KLM in SkyTeam.

The continued existence of RAM, established 1953, was never in much doubt simply because it was and still is a key state asset and employer, through the commercial impact on the flag-carrier of opening the Moroccan market has probably been substantial (see below). The CEO of the airline, Abdelhamid Addou, has started to call for a revision to the open skies bilateral, complaining about a lack of access to key European airports in contrast to the expansion of LCCs in the Moroccan market. He cannot complain too much, however. as the Moroccan government has fully welcomed the surge in tourism associated with the LCCs: according to a 2023 study by Oxford Economics, tourism supported by aviation contributes $8.5bn to the country’s GDP and employs 680,000 people.

Still, back in the early 2000s no one really appreciated the scale of the LCC invasion into the Moroccan market, yet alone the fact that an Irish airline could become a major player in an African domestic market. We estimate that the main LCCs now account for just over half of total Moroccan seat capacity, compared to about 25% for RAM and 25% for all others.

The LCCs have developed new tourism markets beyond the traditional France, notably the UK and Germany. They also tap into significant VFR flows (Moroccan nationals visiting from abroad from Europe are included in the overall tourist totals). There are about 4m Moroccans living in Europe, roughly half in France and Belgium, the rest mostly in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany.

Michael O’Leary seems to love Morocco, praising the regulatory regime and even the national airport charging policy, a sharp contrast with his views about almost every other country Ryanair operates to. For the summer of 2025 the airline based 14 737s in Morocco (seven at Marrakech, three at Fez, two at Agadir, and two at Tangier). Ryanair operates over 200 international routes to/from Morocco. Having launched in the domestic market in 2024, Ryanair has plans to rapidly expand its 11 internal routes. In terms of passengers carried Ryanair will probably reach 6m in 2025 compared to an estimated 7.8m for RAM, and it claims to have invested US$1.4bn into Morocco (we suspect that this figure is the value of its aircraft based in Morocco).

At the beginning of this year Ryanair started flying to Dakhla from Madrid and Lanzarote. Dakhla is a city of just over 100,000 people located 400km north of the Mauritanian border, in Western Sahara (formerly Spanish Sahara). This strip of land (in fact, it is half the size of France) is disputed territory between Morocco, Algeria and the local militia, the Polisario Front, and has been the scene of some vicious fighting. It is suspected that Ryanair and other airlines are being incentivised to fly into the Western Sahara, establishing new tourist centres there, and legitimising Morocco’s claim. In any case, the USA has recently recognised Western Sahara as being de facto part of Morocco, apparently in return for Morocco recognising Israel.

Morocco has also become an important market for other LCCs. easyJet is setting up a three aircraft base at Marrakesh, and it has a major presence at Agadir and Rabat. Transavia operates to most cities in the country. Jet2 and TUI are expanding their Inclusive Tour packages.

Air Arabia Maroc has a base at Tangier and is the second airline at Casablanca. This airline is a joint venture between Air Arabia, based 6,000km away in Sharjah, which owns 41% of the equity and local Moroccan investors and banks which have 59%. It has a fleet of 11 A320ceos and flies primarily to western Europe but also domestically. No financial results are available but its parent airline, Air Arabia, is one of the most profitable carriers in the world, reporting a net profit of AED1.42bn (US$385), a margin on revenues of 26% for the first nine months of 2025.

RAM’s finances and potential order

RAM’s finances are opaque. The company does not publish an annual report nor financial results. A financial summary is supposed to be filed with the Ministry of Economy but accessing this a fruitless task — the official website has been down for at least the past six months.

The Transport Minister, Abdelssamad Kayouh, has stated in parliament that RAM achieved revenues of MAD20bn ($2.2bn) in 2024 but instead of reporting a net result the Minister continued by stating that the airline had cleared MAD935m ($100m) in tax debt. At the recent assembly of the Arab Air Carriers Organization, which was held in Rabat, RAM’s CEO announced that he expected “very positive” results for 2025, but he didn’t say what they might be.

RAM is a 98% state-owned company (Air France owns most of the other 2%), operating a fleet of 62 aircraft — 40 737s, 11 787, a single 767 Freighter and 10 turboprops. The 737-800 fleet is ageing, on average 15 years old, and four are parked. In 2024 7.5m passengers were carried but at a load factor only in the mid-70s.

It has retreated from the regional airports in Morocco, leaving those to the LCCs, and concentrating activities at Casablanca where it controls almost 60% of the capacity, with a smaller base at Rabat, the political capital. 737s are operated on the short/medium haul routes to Europe and medium-haul routes to West Africa, while 787s are deployed to North America where RAM serves New York, Washington, Miami, Toronto and Montreal, and there is also an operation to São Paulo in Brazil, started up last year. It has recently filed an application with the US DoT for a new service to Los Angeles. RAM is a full-service airline with business cabins on both the 737 and 787 fleets. Skytrax awards it four stars, but internet reviews of its service are a bit mixed.

Given the scale of the fleet, the intensely competitive environment on Morocco-Europe, the unclear logic behind the long-haul network and the inevitable state control inefficiencies, it is difficult to see how RAM could be commercially successful. Indeed, in the 2010s RAM was reported to have received MAD9.3bn ($1.0bn) in restructuring aid from the government. And in 2020, the government allocated MAD6bn ($660m) in the form of equity and state-guaranteed loans to support the carrier during the pandemic. Because of the Morocco-EU open aviation agreement RAM could in theory be subject to the state same state aid rules as the European airlines, but this is not an issue at present.

However, RAM has announced plans which, if they are enacted, would greatly raise the airline’s profile. In early 2024 RAM issued a call-for-tender for up to 200 aircraft to be delivered by 2037. As at the end of October 2025 details of the order were still being finalised, according to the CEO, but some details have filtered out. There will be 150 narrowbodies and 50 widebodies, with Airbus, Boeing and Embraer having been approached. Airbus would seem to be the favourite ahead of RAM’s usual supplier, Boeing. No financial details have been revealed for an order worth around $15bn, the type of order normally associated with a super-connector.

RAM expects to receive an average of 15 new aircraft annually from 2028 (which seems optimistic given current backlogs) in order to achieve its official target of 32m passengers by 2037. In the meantime, it will lease in up to 13 aircraft per year. Avolon is delivering six 737MAXs this year.

The government has also a plan — Airports 2030 — to invest MAD38bn ($10bn) improve airport facilities throughout the country and in particular to develop Casablanca Mohammed V Airport where it has launched a tender for a new terminal that will increase capacity to 35m passengers by 2030 from the current 10.5m.

The key element in RAM’s future strategy is to develop as a connecting carrier, funnelling traffic flows from Europe and North America through a hub at Casablanca to West and South Africa. This sounds like a Maghrebian version of the hub system that Ethiopian Airlines has successfully built at Addis Ababa with the help of the Chinese.

The African hub strategy has potential. As well has having strong local traffic demand, Casablanca is geographically well positioned between Western Europe and West Africa. The map shows the extent of the network in Africa in terms of points served, but this is slightly illusory, as most of the seat capacity, 90%-plus, is deployed on northern routes while services to the south remain constrained by government restrictions. The 1999 Yamoussoukro Treaty and the 2018 African Union’s Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) initiative have yet to be adequately implemented. Nevertheless, RAM does market connecting flights from, for example, London through to cities like Lagos, Accra, Abuja and Kinshasa, all important markets that are woefully underserved by direct services.

Morocco has transformed its tourist industry by adopting air transport liberalisation, in the process disturbing vested interests. It may need to continue further along this path with its flag-carrier. For the proposed Casablanca hub to work RAM needs to escape from state control and find an investor with financial resources and expertise in hub building and operations. As Captain Renault once said, “Round up the usual suspects” : THY, Emirates, Qatar?