Ryanair carried some 12.2 million passengers in January, a 3 per cent increase on the same month last year.
On Friday, the airline, Europe’s largest by passenger traffic, said it has flown 182.1 million guests on a rolling basis so far in its current financial year, which began in April 2022, a 10 per cent increase year-on-year.
Ryanair expects to have flown some 183.5 million passengers by its fiscal year ends in March, up from 181 million last year, targeting 300 million passengers by 2034.
However, the airline said its load factor – the number of available seats filled by passengers – declined 2 percentage points from 91 per cent in January 2023 to 89 per cent last month due to the remove of its flights from a number of travel agent websites.
Ryanair abruptly removed its flights from some websites in December, part of a long-running row between chief executive Michael O’Leary and websites like Booking.com, Kiwi and Lastminute.
The group subsequently reached agreements with Kiwi and Loveholidays and on Monday, Mr O’Leary said Ryanair would be open to doing business with other online agents.
Speaking to industry analysts after Ryanair published results for the first nine months of its financial year, Mr O’Leary said the airline was in talks with most of the top 10 online agents about possible partnerships.
He stressed that any such deals would be conditional on the agents not adding extra charges to Ryanair’s prices and providing the airline with customers’ details.
The airline reported that profits plunged 93 per cent to €15 million in the three months to the end of December, as higher fuel and other costs hit its bottom line, but it earned a surplus of €2.19 billion over the nine months from April to the end of 2023.
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