Holidaymakers are packing their wheelies and heading for Europe’s beaches in their droves, determined to make up for two summers of Covid curbs. This week, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said the airline hoped to fly 165 million passengers in its current financial year, ahead of the 149 million it carried in the 12 months to March 2020 before the pandemic grounded air travel. The Irish giant has 15 per cent more seats available to travellers than it did in 2019/20.
On Thursday, its rival Easyjet said bookings for the last 10 weeks were “consistently above pre-Covid levels”, although, unlike Ryanair, the British carrier has fewer seats this year than it did before the virus struck. And earlier this month, Aer Lingus predicted that it could break even this year after 24 months of losses and said it aims to reach more than 90 per cent of pre-pandemic capacity.
Stephen Furlong, aviation analyst with Irish stockbrokers, Davy, says the evidence from airlines dismisses any notion that Covid would change air travel. “There is enormous pent-up demand,” he says. “In European short-haul, we’re at 90 per cent of 2019 capacity.”
Holidaymakers
Observers always believed domestic and short-haul travel would revive fastest as the pandemic receded, while long-haul’s recovery would lag. Enda Corneille, Gulf carrier Emirates’ Ireland country manager, says the opposite appears to be true. “We’re seeing demand right across the aircraft, business, first-class and economy,” he says. “At the moment long-haul demand is out the door.”
Emirates is filling up to 95 per cent of the seats on its aircraft out of Dublin. Corneille observes that the queues at its check-in desks are more like those for Malaga or other European sunspots. “It’s young couples, it’s families,” he says, adding that people are clearly treating themselves after two years of Covid.
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