Ryanair has warned that the recovery in travel demand remains “fragile”, despite the airline planning to operate 15 per cent more capacity this summer than it did in 2019.
The Irish budget carrier made a net loss of €355 million during the financial year up to 31 March 2022, an improvement on the €1 billion loss of the previous year as demand recovered strongly, despite the emergence of the Omicron variant and the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
Ryanair saw annual revenue rose by 193 per cent year-on-year to €4.8 billion as passenger numbers increased from 27.5 million last year to 97.1 million this year. But this figure was still down by 35 per cent on the airline’s annual pre-Covid passenger traffic of 149 million.
The airline said that it had continued to discount to stimulate demand in recent months, with average fares down by 27 per cent year-on-year to €27. Although this was boosted by “solid” ancillary revenue which averaged €22 per passenger as more customers chose to pay for priority boarding and reserved seating.
Despite this, Ryanair is expanding aggressively this summer with 15 new airport bases and 770 new routes over the coming year. The airline has doubled capacity at Rome Fiumicino, Lisbon and Vienna this year, and will also base a record 33 aircraft at Dublin for summer 2022.
Ryanair’s group CEO Michael O’Leary said the airline hoped to return to “reasonable profitability” during the current financial year.
“This recovery, however, remains fragile,” he added. “This was clearly evidenced by the sudden and unexpected emergence of the Omicron variant pre-Christmas and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, both of which immediately damaged close-in bookings and yields for the Christmas and Easter peak travel periods.
“Given the continuing risk of adverse news flows on both these topics, it is impractical (if not impossible) to provide a sensible or accurate profit guidance range at this time.
“There is, however, pent-up demand and we are cautiously optimistic that peak summer 2022 fares will be somewhat ahead of peak summer 2019 pre-Covid levels.”
Ryanair still forecasts that it will grow passenger traffic to 165 million over the next year, which would be 12 per cent above pre-pandemic levels.