Ryanair: cuts full-year traffic forecast; shares drop

(CercleFinance.com) - Ryanair on Thursday cut its full-year traffic forecast due to the recent Covid lockdowns imposed in Ireland, the UK, and other European countries, following a spike in cases.


Europe's largest low-cost airline has cut it traffic forecast for the current financial year to end-March from currently "below 35 million" to between 26 million and 30 million passengers.

Given the new travel restrictions in force, Ryanair said it now expects its January traffic to fall to under 1.25 million passengers, while February and March traffic could reach just 500,000 passengers each month.

In response, the budget carrier plans to significantly reduce its scheduled flights from the end of January.

In its statement, Ryanair calls on the Irish and UK Governments to accelerate the sluggish pace of vaccine rollouts, saying that "vaccinations rather than lockdowns is the way out of this Covid-19 crisis."

Its shares were down over 2% on Thursday morning.

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