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RYANAIR SAW A rise in passenger numbers, revenue and profit in the first half of this year.
The airline today reported an 11% increase in its first half profit to €1.29 billion. Customer traffic grew 11% to 72.1 million thanks to a strong Easter and a 5% reduction in airfare.
Revenue rose 7% to €4.4 billion.
The company expects the second half of the year to slow down, expecting to carry 129 million people due to the grounding of 25 aircraft after the company’s rostering failures.
In its statement is says that these failures have been addressed and cost the company €25 million.
The airline came in from strong criticism after it cancelled 2,100 flights between September and October and a further 18,000 between November and March.
Ryanair put this down to a rostering issue around having to allocate too much leave in the final months of the year. There have been numerous reports that the cancellations are down to large numbers of pilots leaving the airline, but Ryanair has repeatedly denied this.
We have added resources to our pilot recruitment, base manager and rostering teams so that we can respond quickly to the needs of our pilots and cabin crew, promptly address their requests, and work more closely with them to facilitate opportunities at those bases where they wish to live and develop their careers. The test of any management team, is the speed and effectiveness with which they respond to a crisis, and the pilot rostering failure in early September was just such a crisis.
“We have responded quickly to repair this failure, eliminate further cancellations and we are determined to invest the time, money and manpower to ensure that it never recurs.”
The company says that it “remains concerned” about the terms of the UK’s departure from the EU in March 2019, saying that Brexit could see a chaotic period around April 2019.
CEO Michael O’Leary said the figures were strong despite last month’s disruption.
“Prior to this event, we were on track to deliver strong H1 results during which we opened three new bases and 80 new routes. We took delivery of 35 new B737’s in the first 6 months of 2017, we stimulated 11% traffic growth with 5% lower airfares, and achieved an industry record load factor of 97% in the peak summer months.”
“I sincerely want to thank all our people for their help and support over what has been a very difficult 4 week period in September. Our pilots, cabin crew, customer handling and customer service teams have responded brilliantly to a very difficult situation that was not of their making.
“Thousands of our pilots and cabin crew have volunteered to work days off to ensure that disruption to our customers was minimised. Our customer service teams have worked late and over weekends to re-accommodate those customers who were disrupted and have dealt with over 700,000 requests in just 18 days, a phenomenal performance of which we are extremely proud.”
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& Fair play to Ryanair, good luck in the future
@Dominick Lavin: A “thank you” special dividend to loyal shareholders and staff who hung in there would not be surprising.
@Dominick Lavin: Just prove that people can take any abuse if you let them to save few bucks..
Not bad results for an airline which many posters on here over the last few weeks have suggested is on the way out or could go bust.
@Nick Allen: Well, that’s the first half of the year to be fair. The second half is where the mess up happened.
@Peter:
I am sure that with profits of 1.29BN in the first 6 months of the year and anticipating to carry 50m passengers (about 4 times as many as Aer Lingus will carry in a full year) during the second 6 months of the year that they may manage to keep their heads above water and avoid the debt collectors knocking on the door.
@Nick Allen: the part you’re missing is where the cheapest airline has to pay for a more expensive airline to carry their passengers and has to cover the extra cost on each and every one.
@Dave O Keeffe: Quick maths. 1.29bn profit, 20k flights cancelled. That means they have roughly 65k of profit to distribute to cover costs of each flight cancelled. Ryanair planes carry about 180 passengers. So if the cancelled flight were full that means they have about 350 Euro to compensate each passenger, just using the profits of H1 this year……hmmm I think they will be ok
@Mary Murphy: Quick maths. Ryanair flights are not full. H2 will show a massive fall off in capacity, revenue and load factor. I think we should wait for full year results before jumping to defence mode.
First half of the year?
The second half was the time that its staff abandoned the airline en masses for worker exploitation.
The interesting thing is that they are expecting the year profit to be as they thought or planned. That would leave any rational person to believe that they knew the disaster they were facing into in the second half of the year much earlier and factored into their profits for the year.
@Hank_Scorpio:
where does it say that?
@Nick Allen: it doesn’t but I have read various news articles about it today.
Well considering the disruption happened in the last 3 weeks of their half year results not a shock….
Despite all of the begrudgery this man is here to stay
How much of those ‘profits’ is money owed to passengers for compensation but were not paid by ryanair?
@Andy K: None. Any monies owed to passengers are accrued in the accounts.
That “despite” means absolutely nothing considering everything listed after happened in the second half of the year.
@Amy Wallis:
Obviously all the disruption caused damage to Ryanair but not in a direct sense. Given the enormous size of Ryanair the loss of revenue from those flights and cost of compensation will be a drop in an ocean to them.
It’s the long term possible loss of reputation that matters, and that would be difficult to quantify.
And I remember the state banks returning similar figures during the Celtic Tiger.
Fly Dublin to Barcelona with Ryanair or Aer Lingus for a family of 5 cost 1,500 in June 2018 , change departure airport to Belfast cost 485.00 . Rip off Ireland alive and well !
Lies lies and more lies…
@MickeyC: “Lies” are spelled “marketing” in capitalism.
Great news – well done Ryanair. Keep the success story going and the fares affordable
Was it iphone 4 that have a problem with signal unless you handle it special way? Was it iphone 6 bending in a pocket like some banana? All that issues never stopped Apple from selling them in millions…
These are results from the first half of 2017 – pre all the mishaps, so change the headline of the article
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