Go's passenger numbers up 81.5% year-on-year in March

Go carried 81.5% more passengers in March than in the same month last year.

The news, coming as easyJet also announced a big increase, confirms the strength of the no-frills sector.

Go carried 428,999 passengers last month, versus 236,344 last time.

Load factor increased by 8.9% to 78.4%. Including passengers who paid for seats but failed to turn up, load factor was 83.4%, up 9%.

Available Seat Kilometres (ASKs) increased by 40.2% to 475,936.

Commenting on BA's recent move to cut fares, Go's chief executive Barbara Cassani says: "These figures show that British Airways' actions are too little, too late. The low-cost genie is well and truly out of the bottle."

Go was sold by BA in June, 2001, for £110m (€179m) to a management buy-out team backed by 3i Group.

EasyJet carried 839,472 passengers in March, an increase of 39% on a year ago, when it carried 603,812 passengers.

Fewer seats are left unsold too, with planes flying 85.9% full, compared with the 82.6% of available seats sold last year.

EasyJet carried a total of 8,254,773 passengers in the 12 months to the end of March. This represents an 84.7% load factor - the number of passengers as a proportion of the number of seats available.