Passengers will pay higher prices for air tickets this summer due to limited capacity, warned the director of the Irish low-cost airline Ryanair, pointing out the delay of ordered Boeing planes.
Due to the limited number of aircraft available, European airlines will have problems meeting the demand for travel during the peak season, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said.
Ryanair ticket prices will be up to 10 percent more expensive this summer than a year ago, O’Leary added, predicting that the number of passengers will grow less than last year due to delays in Boeing’s new planes.
Ryanair had estimated that it would carry 205 million passengers in the business year ending in March 2025, compared to 183.5 million forecasted in the business year 2023/2024.
At the conference in Dublin, O’Leary said that they could lower the estimate for 2024/2025, reports agency Hina.
”With fewer planes, we may have to reduce the estimate by 205 million to 200 million passengers. It could be less than 200 million, but at this stage we don’t know yet,” said the head of Ryanair.
”This probably means that even our growth this year in Europe will be limited, and I think this will lead to higher ticket prices throughout Europe for the summer of 2024. The prices will also be higher in the summer of 2024 than they were in the summer of 2023,” he stated.
”In the summer of 2023, our ticket prices increased by an average of 17 percent. We think that this year the increase will not be in such two-digit proportions, and we are making calculations for a five to ten percent increase in ticket prices,” said O’Leary.
E.Dz.
