Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, today released its revised winter schedule. Due to increased flight restrictions imposed by EU governments, air travel to/from much of Central Europe, the UK, Ireland, Austria, Belgium, and Portugal have been heavily curtailed. This has caused forward bookings to weaken slightly in October, but materially in November and December.
In light of these weaker bookings and Ryanair’s plan to operate with 70% load factors, Ryanair has today further reduced its winter schedule from November to March, taking capacity down from 60% to 40% of the prior year. Ryanair expects to maintain up to 65% of its winter route network, but with reduced frequencies. In addition to the winter closure of bases in Cork, Shannon, and Toulouse, Ryanair has announced significant base aircraft cuts in Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Vienna.
With this greatly reduced winter capacity and load factors of about 70%, Ryanair now expects full-year traffic to fall to about 38 million guests. However, this guidance could be further revised downwards if EU governments continue to mismanage air travel and impose more lockdowns this winter.
“While the Covid situation remains fluid and hard to predict, we must now cut our full-year traffic forecast to 38m guests. Our focus continues to be on maintaining as large a schedule as we can sensibly operate to keep our aircraft, our pilots and our cabin crew current and employed while minimizing job losses” - Ryanair’s Group CEO Michael O’Leary stated.
