Ryanair exceeds passenger targets

Ryanair has beaten its own annual passenger targets for its latest financial year, which ended on March 31.

The low fares carrier, yesterday, published its latest set of monthly traffic statistics, showing it carried 6.67 million people on its European flight network during March; 28% up on the same month last year, which saw 5.2 million people fly with the airline.

Load factor, for the month, which acts as a measure of how full the average plane was, rather than just how many seats were sold, was up by ten percentage points to 90%.

Total passengers for the rolling year to the end of March, meanwhile, grew by 11% to 90.5 million people.

Ryanair — which upped its net profit guidance four times during the course of its latest fiscal year — started its financial year by guiding for 85 million passengers, before upgrading and settling on a final overall target of 90 million.

For its newly-started financial year — up to the end of March 2016 — the company expects to carry 10.5% more, or at least 100 million passengers.

“This is an exceptional performance, by any standard, and above estimates provided at the third-quarter results of traffic growth of just over 90m and a load factor of 87%,” said Stephen Furlong, of Davy Stockbrokers.

“March loads were up by ten points to 90%. Key for the year will be yield for the quarter; it is apparent that Easter falling in April has helped volumes and, presumably, yields in the quarter,” he added.

Ryanair put the improved traffic performance down to the success of its ‘Always Getting Better’ customer improvements programme.