A recession could come, inflation is making people more economical, but according to low-cost airline Ryanair, they will not give up travel entirely. Rather, they would look for the cheapest offers – a phenomenon that Aldi and Ikea have already noticed.
After a significant recovery in ticket demand, Europe’s largest low-cost airline Ryanair expects more passengers and a profit of more than one billion euros for the year as a whole. According to the company, it does not see any possible effects of a recession on demand for cheap flights this winter.
Ryanair now expects 168 million passengers for the fiscal year that began April 1, the company said. 166.5 million passengers had previously been planned. After a successful summer, the Irish airline posted an adjusted profit of 1.37 billion euros in the first half of the year after a loss of 48 million euros in the same period last year. The company also earned more than in the half-year before the Corona crisis.
Rather than giving up travel, people are more likely to opt for the lowest fares available, Ryanair said. The low-cost airline compared itself to Aldi, Lidl and Ikea, which also recovered strongly after the Covid crisis. Ryanair will offer ten percent more seats this winter than before the pandemic, while most competitors in the European Union want to reduce their capacity by around 20 percent.
Assuming that there are no unforeseeable negative events, such as a flare-up of the pandemic, the company should report full-year profits of between 1 and 1.2 billion euros, adjusted for special effects. This should minimize the losses that are more common in winter.
In the past six months, Ryanair carried around 95.1 million passengers, more than twice as many as in the same period last year, which was affected by the corona virus. Machine utilization improved from 79 to 94 percent. In the course of this, sales tripled to 6.6 billion euros.
