Aer Lingus numbers fall by 8.4%

TOUGHER operating conditions saw Aer Lingus passenger numbers decline again last month, falling by 8.4% to 716,000.

Fri, 08 Apr, 2011 - 01:00

Niamh Hennessy

The airline, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, said its load factor, which is a measure of seats filled was down 3.7 points to 72.2%.

Aer Lingus said, however, the year-on-year comparison of booked passenger numbers is impacted by the timing of the Easter holiday period, which started in the last week of March in 2010. Easter 2011 begins in late April.

The company said the drop in load factor is explained by a planned reduction in capacity at London Gatwick, Cork and Shannon.

Bloxham said the passenger numbers released by Aer Lingus reflect tough operating conditions in the Irish-centric business model.

Davy analyst Joshua Goldman said: “The company continues to manage capacity to match demand and the load factor was sequentially better than February 2011 which was impacted by the strike.

“However, even with capacity reductions, load factor has decreased notably in short-haul,” he said.

The Aer Lingus shares price closed down 2.8758% at 74.3 cents.

The news comes as it was revealed that Aer Arann will no longer schedule flights to Dublin from Galway, Sligo and Knock as Public Service Obligation (PSO) contracts finish.

Aer Arann chairman Pádraig Ó Céidigh said that the airline can no longer operate the cancelled routes as they were not financially viable.

Meanwhile, the largest customer for commercial jet unit deliveries in the world last year was Ryanair, taking 48 Boeing 737-800s during the year, according to figures from the Air Transport World.

This is a unit measure only and using monetary value China Southern was first, taking $4.47 billion (€3.12bn) worth of airplanes, Ryanair was number two with a delivery value of $3.74bn.

Bloxham said it turns out too that Ryanair was the number one customer of Boeing using both unit size and value metrics.

The largest customer of Airbus was China Southern with $3.5bn of deliveries. Therefore Ryanair’s delivery value eclipsed the biggest Airbus ticket too, according to the stockbrokers.