RYANAIR TO CUT WINTER FLIGHTS BY ONE THIRD

 Cyprus Mail 15 October 2020  - by Andrew Rosenbaum

Ryanair says Covid-19 vaccine will restore airlines.

Ryanair is cutting the number of its winter flights by a third, the airline announced in a press release on Thursday.

The cut, as announced, is down to 60 per cent of flights in the previous year, from 40 per cent of 2019 flights, the release indicated.

Europe’s largest airline attributed the reduction to increased flight restrictions imposed by EU governments, which have caused air travel both to and from much of Central Europe, the UK, Ireland, Austria, Belgium and Portugal to be heavily curtailed. This has caused forward bookings to weaken slightly in Oct, but materially in November and December, the statement said.

In light of these weaker bookings, and Ryanair’s plan to operate with a 70 per cent load factors. The airline expects to maintain up to 65 per cent 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.

Ryanair now expects full year (FY21) traffic to fall to approx. 38 million passengers, although this guidance could be further revised downwards if EU Govts continue to mismanage air travel and impose more lockdowns this winter.

Ryanair’s Group CEO Michael O’Leary said: “While we deeply regret these winter schedule cuts they have been forced upon us by government mismanagement of EU air travel. 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 minimising job losses.”

O’Leary warned of more job losses in store. “It is inevitable, given the scale of these cutbacks, that we will be implementing  more unpaid leave, and job sharing this winter in those bases where we have agreed reduced working time and pay, but this is a better short term outcome than mass job losses. There will regrettably be more redundancies at those small number of cabin crew bases, where we have still not secured agreement on working time and pay cuts, which is the only alternative.”

O’Leary added that he expects the recovery of short haul air travel in Europe once an effective Covid-19 vaccine is developed.