easyJet Launches London Luton to Rabat-Salé Twice-Weekly Service

easyJet has added London Luton to Rabat-Salé to its winter network, with a twice-weekly service that began on Thursday 5 November 2026. The route operates on Thursdays and Sundays, gives the Moroccan capital its first Luton link and its second London airport, and forms part of a batch of 13 new UK winter routes the carrier put on sale in June.

Route overview

The Luton to Rabat service operates twice weekly on Thursdays and Sundays through the northern winter 2026/27 season. Schedule filings summarised by AeroRoutes list the route as effective 5 November 2026 with no end date, unlike several of easyJet’s other winter additions that carry fixed seasonal windows. The great-circle distance between the two airports is approximately 2,050 kilometres, placing the sector towards the upper end of easyJet’s short-haul range with a block time of around three hours.

easyJet confirmed the launch date in its June announcement, which also set out start dates for Southend to Lyon on 3 December and Southend to Sharm el Sheikh on 4 January 2027. The airline stated that package holidays through easyJet holidays would be available on all of the new routes except Luton to Rabat, which positions the service as a point-to-point scheduled operation rather than a leisure package product. Rabat is one of six new winter destinations from Luton; the others are Ljubljana, Nuremberg, Kittila, Strasbourg and Prishtina.

easyJet network context

The route was announced on 25 June 2026 as part of a second tranche of 13 new routes from 10 UK airports, following an earlier batch of 13 winter routes from eight UK airports two weeks previously. Kevin Doyle, easyJet’s UK country manager, said at the time: “We’re thrilled to be announcing a further 13 new routes this winter, bringing the number of new routes on sale over the past two weeks to a total of 26.”

The tranche covered destinations in Hungary, Germany, Poland, Austria, France, Egypt, Morocco and Norway. It included easyJet’s first Nuremberg services, from Gatwick, Luton and Manchester, a new Edinburgh to Tromsø link and the carrier’s first international route from the Isle of Man, a weekly Saturday service to Geneva.

Morocco features prominently in the carrier’s winter 2026/27 expansion. The AeroRoutes summary of easyJet’s northern winter additions lists new services to Agadir from Birmingham and Bordeaux, Marrakech from Newcastle, Prague and Zurich, and Essaouira from Nantes, alongside the Rabat launch. The pattern is consistent with a broader move by European low-cost carriers to add North African winter-sun capacity, supported by visa-free access to Morocco for UK and EU passport holders.

About the aircraft

easyJet did not specify an aircraft type for the route in its public announcement. Schedule data compiled by AeroRoutes as of 18 October 2026 shows the service filed with Airbus A319 and A320 equipment, the two smallest types in the carrier’s all-Airbus narrowbody fleet of more than 340 aircraft. easyJet configures the A319 with 156 seats and the A320ceo with 180 or 186 seats, so the twice-weekly schedule provides roughly 310 to 370 seats per week in each direction, depending on the variant assigned on the day. The airline is progressively replacing its A319 fleet with A320neo and A321neo aircraft, and AeroRoutes notes that several routes in the same winter programme have already seen revised aircraft assignments since first filing.

About the airports

London Luton Airport is easyJet’s home base and the location of its corporate headquarters at Hangar 89. According to bigairports.com network data, Luton currently serves 139 routes, with a schedule weighted heavily towards Spain and short-haul leisure markets. The four busiest destinations by scheduled flights in the dataset are all Spanish: Palma de Mallorca with 1,066 flights across five operators, Alicante with 928, Barcelona with 895 and Málaga with 779. The UK government approved Luton’s expansion to 32 million annual passengers in April 2025, and the airport remains the fifth busiest in the UK by passenger volume.

Rabat-Salé Airport is a much smaller operation, with 49 routes in the bigairports.com dataset. Its network is dominated by France, reflecting Morocco’s historic ties and diaspora traffic: Paris Charles de Gaulle is the busiest link with 483 flights across four operators, followed by Paris Orly with 289 flights and three operators. Brussels also has three operators, while Barcelona, Málaga and Madrid provide the main Spanish links. Rabat’s only long-haul connection is a thin Medina service. Before easyJet’s arrival, London Stansted was the sole UK destination, served by a single operator with 57 flights in the dataset. Morocco’s airports authority ONDA is expanding Rabat-Salé as part of national preparations for the 2030 FIFA World Cup, which Morocco co-hosts with Spain and Portugal.

Market context and competition

The London to Rabat market has until now been served by Ryanair from Stansted alone, with no scheduled service from Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton or City. Royal Air Maroc concentrates its UK operation on Casablanca Mohammed V, roughly 90 kilometres south-west of Rabat and connected to the capital by rail, so most UK traffic to Rabat has historically routed via Casablanca or via Paris, where four operators compete on the Charles de Gaulle sector alone.

easyJet’s entry therefore creates the first direct competition on the London to Rabat O&D, albeit at modest scale: two weekly rotations against Ryanair’s established Stansted schedule. The two carriers serve different London catchments, with Luton drawing from Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and north-west London via the Thameslink and East Midlands rail corridors, while Stansted serves Essex, east London and East Anglia. The exclusion of the route from the easyJet holidays programme indicates the airline expects demand to be led by visiting-friends-and-relatives traffic and independent travellers rather than packaged leisure.

At the network level, the launch adds Rabat to easyJet’s Moroccan points alongside Marrakech, Agadir and Essaouira, and gives the Moroccan capital its first link to the airline’s largest UK base.