Travel News · 5 min read · October 9, 2026

Why 2027 is the year to let your local airport pick your next trip

A new wave of regional routes means your local airport is about to get a lot more interesting. Here are ten of our favourites, and a new tool to find the rest.

Short on time? Let us summarise this guide for you.

Airlines are opening a remarkable run of new routes from UK and Ireland regional airports for 2027, from a first ever direct UK to Armenia service out of Luton to new long haul links to Toronto and Tanzania from airports that have never offered them before. The pattern holds from the smallest airports to the biggest: Humberside has picked up a route to Slovenia, Aberdeen is getting its first ever direct Barcelona service, and Belfast International may soon host a brand new transatlantic carrier, while Dublin has just added China Eastern's longest ever nonstop route out of the airport, to Shanghai. This piece rounds up ten of the most interesting airport and destination pairings for 2027 and beyond, and introduces Nearest Exit, a new tool that lets anyone check the full list for their own nearest airport.

Every year a handful of new routes open up from Britain's regional airports. 2027 is shaping up to be different: not a handful, but a genuine wave of them, and a striking number are the kind of destination you'd expect from a major hub, not a small regional field. A new airline is about to fly the first ever direct service between the UK and Armenia. Dublin has just landed its longest ever nonstop flight. Aberdeen, Cardiff and Shannon are all picking up long haul routes that didn't exist twelve months ago.

The upshot is that where you live increasingly dictates where you can go without first trekking to Heathrow or Gatwick, and in 2027 that list is about to get a lot more interesting. We've gone through the new route announcements, airport by airport, and pulled out ten of our favourite airport and destination pairings below: a mix of genuinely new 2027 routes and quietly brilliant options that are already flying and still flying under most people's radar.

Want to check your own nearest airport rather than take our word for ten of them? Scroll to the bottom for Nearest Exit, our new tool that does exactly that.

The long haul surprises

These are the pairings that genuinely surprised us: proper long haul routes landing at airports that, until now, were strictly short haul territory.

Genuinely new for 2027

These are the announcements that made us sit up: routes that simply didn't exist before, several of them exclusive to a single airline from a single airport.

Hidden gems, already flying

Not every highlight needs a 2027 launch date. Some of the best finds are routes that quietly started in the last year or two and still feel like a secret.

And that's just ten. We found genuinely interesting new or existing routes at every single one of the thirty UK and Ireland airports we checked, from Aberdeen's oil industry era links to Esbjerg and Stavanger, to a new Turkish Airlines service landing at Stansted, to Shannon's long running Boston and New York connections. The honest truth is that this list could easily have run to a hundred.

However you get there, the plan on the day still needs sorting, whichever airport you're flying from. Our Trip Wizard pulls your flights, hotel, parking and lounge together in one place once you've picked where you're headed.