The low-cost-high-fee airline has been badly affected by the pandemic and its resulting border closures and travel bans. However, the airline says there is still much uncertainty around the lifting of the current travel restrictions as well as how much extra passengers will now be willing to shell out for flights. Europe's largest budget carrier says the 12 months to the end of March this year have been the most challenging in its history, sacking more than 1000 people and cutting capacity by around 80%.
The airline announced a record annual after-tax loss of €815 million for the financial year ending 31st March, which was slightly better than the firm's own forecast of €834 million. "It's better than we predicted, but still a fairly traumatic loss for an airline that has been consistently profitable for our 35-year history," Group Chief Executive Michael O'Leary said.
Ryanair flew 27.5 million passengers during the year, a vast number of people, yet dramatically lower than the 149 million the previous year. However, the airline is seeing an increase in bookings and expected between 5-6 million passengers to fly with it during the April-June quarter. O'Leary believes the budget airline will fly between 80 and 100 million people in the year to March 31, 2022.
"The likely outturn... is that we are looking at something between a very small loss and break-even for the next 12 months but there are a lot of moving parts and there is a lot of uncertainty," commented O'Leary, "Most of the uncertainty revolves around the timing of the recovery and the fares that people will pay into the key June, July, August, September travel period," he said.
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