Ryanair half-year profits soar to record £1.2bn amid strong flight demand
Ryanair has reported a surge in profits to a record €1.4bn (£1.2bn) for the first half of its financial year, as the airline said it was seeing no letup in the demand for air travel going into winter after record summer passenger numbers.
The airline reported greater traffic at higher fares than the same period in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, the first time that has been achieved since the first Covid-19 lockdowns.
Profits after tax soared to €1.37bn in the six months to 30 September, compared with a loss of €48m for the same period last year. Revenues for the period tripled to €6.6bn, as it carried 95.1 million passengers, compared with 39.1 million last year.
Airlines across Europe have experienced a rise in demand in recent months as countries have eased pandemic travel restrictions and customers have resumed air travel for business and holidays.
Ryanair had reported profits of €203m between April and June, its first profitable spring since before the pandemic, but the chief executive, Michael O’Leary, said the strength of the acceleration since then had been unexpected and that “forward bookings into Christmas look strong”.
It was able to charge passengers 14% more to travel compared with the pre-pandemic period, and said it would restore pay levels for its crews to pre-pandemic levels on 1 December – four months earlier than previously planned.
“The strength of the recovery this summer has surprised us,” O’Leary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. “We see that huge pent-up demand for travel. We thought it would ease off in September, October as we came to the winter, but so far to date there’s not much sign of that.”
As world leaders gather in Egypt for the Cop27 climate conference, O’Leary claimed the biggest thing European governments could do to cut airline carbon emissions was to improve air traffic control to avoid wasted time in the air. However, activists and climate scientists have long argued that airlines themselves should pay higher taxes to reflect the pollution they create. Ryanair is one of Europe’s largest corporate carbon polluters.
O’Leary said there was little sign of customer numbers dipping in the UK, Ryanair’s main market, either from climate-conscious customers or from people worried about an economic recession, which the Bank of England says has already begun. He said it was an “unusual situation” that the UK was entering a recession with little impact so far on unemployment numbers.
He added that the company was not worried about the impact of a recession on Ryanair’s position, likening it to lower-cost options such as the supermarket Aldi and the furniture store Ikea, which he said “always grow stronger in a recession”.