Budget Airlines Battle, Dec 07: Ryanair vs. SkyEurope

I got into the habit of blogging about the monthly passenger traffic statistics of two of Europe's low-cost carriers months ago at EuroCheapo, and I think I'll continue doing so here. Both Ryanair and SkyEurope make monthly passenger traffic information available a few days into the following month, allowing for easy comparisons.

Over the first months of 2007, SkyEurope had the edge over Ryanair in terms of increase of passenger numbers and load factor, which designates the number of "earned" seats, that is, seats sold or booked via some promotional guise. They've never had the edge in numbers of passengers flown—Ryanair flies almost 15 times the passengers that SkyEurope does. By the middle of the year, Ryanair was performing better than SkyEurope on both passenger number increase and load factor.

In December, SkyEurope achieved a 40 percent increase in number of passengers flown against December 2006 stats. Their load factor was 9 percent lower in December 2007 than it was in the previous December. Meanwhile, Ryanair managed an 18 percent increase in number of passengers flown against December 2006 numbers, with a decrease in load factor of 2 percent.

SkyEurope cut back on bases and routes in 2007 and even sold some airplanes; their passenger numbers probably aren't going to continue to rise in 2008; Ryanair's no doubt will continue to rise modestly. The drop in load factor at both airlines in December is a bit surprising. Could it be that more Europeans stayed put over Christmas this year?

Lastly, I've long been curious about the Ryanair habit of blocking rows of seats off. Could this be some crafty way of increasing load factor numbers, by identifying some rows as nominally off limits? Any ideas?