The European low-cost airline industry just seems to burrow deeper and deeper into trouble on a daily basis. There are almost daily portents of worse times ahead. Air Berlin just lowered profit expectations for 2008. Clickair and Vueling are in merger talks. Centralwings has cut tons of flghts. Ryanair is closing a call center and freezing senior management pay.
With all that in the background, Ryanair's March performance was pretty impressive. The airline posts a 19 percent jump in passengers in March 2008 against March 2007, from 3.77 to 4.48 million. Its load factor (to review: "the number of passengers as a proportion of the number of seats available for passengers") rises one percent, from 78 to 79 percent.
I'll look forward to tossing these numbers around in comparison with other LCC stats tomorrow or next week.
Thanks as always to Air Scoop for the top-notch European budget airline news digest.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see an equivalent of whats happening with the banks (Bear Sterns, Northern Rock, HSBC) but with Airlines. The growth cannot continue at this rate and something has to give. With several of the Spanish airlines finding business very difficult, I think that we'll see things get tighter, costs continue to climb and a bubble going to burst at some point later this year or early next.
Posted by: Mark | April 04, 2008 at 20:32