Aer Lingus hoping for wet August

The head of Aer Lingus, is one of the few people in Ireland hoping that August is a wash out, as the airlines last minute sales suffer due to the good weather.

Christoph Müller made his comments after the airline announced that their profits will be broadly in line with the €69.1m they announced last year, when the company’s business routes to London were completely wiped out by the Olympics.

Second-quarter earnings on that basis declined 8.2% to €29.1m, while sales increased 6.2% to €398.2m.

Mr Müller said that the good weather will have an effect on their seat sales but it won’t impact the airline’s overall annual performance.

“There is an effect from the weather. We don’t sell last-minute deals to warm water destinations. It won’t have an effect at the end of the year. With August to come, hopefully it will continue to rain.”

Aer Lingus said that the first half of the year is traditionally loss making with in the industry and that the airline would recover the €16.4m loss it has reported for the first half of the year.

Some of the losses were once off costs such as the redeployment of planes and €2.1m spend on training staff and adding aircraft for a wet-lease operation to begin in April for Virgin Atlantic Airways’ Little Red domestic service,

Mr Müller said these costs had seen their operating loss treble compared to last year.

“The first half of our financial year is seasonally loss making and we are reporting an operating loss (before exceptional items) which is €12m higher than the prior year. This performance reflects the impact of a number of one-off factors including the start-up of our contract flying operations and planned changes to our long haul fleet,” he said.

Aer lingus reported that their long haul fare revenue grew by 16.2%, with short haul growth only 1.1%, the airline is concentrating on the long haul market to drive its growth.