Ryanair has delivered a stronger than expected performance in the first month of its significantly expanded winter schedule. Despite increasing November seat capacity by 13% (over Nov 13) and opening a large number of new city pair routes designed to appeal to business traffic, Ryanair’s November load factor rose by 7% points from 81% in 2013 to 88% in 2014.
Ryanair noted that it had materially exceeded its first month load factor targets across a significant number of city pair markets where it is offering business type frequencies in direct competition to longer established, higher fare airlines.
Ryanair attributes this stronger than expected initial winter performance to its “Always Getting Better” customer programme, its stronger forward booking strategy and the airline’s substantial fare and unit cost advantage over all other European airlines.
As a result of this better than expected performance, Ryanair has now revised its full year traffic guidance up from 89m to just over 90m customers, and raised its full year profit after-tax forecast from its previous range of €750m to €770m, to a new range of €810m to €830m. Ryanair noted that the final full year profit will still be heavily reliant on close in bookings and yields in Q4 (Jan – Mar 15) over which it presently has very little visibility.