Ryanair’s December carryings rose by 9% year-on-year despite distribution being cut by key online travel agencies and 900 flights cancelled due to the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Ryanair reported that a number of OTAs, including Booking.com, Kiwi and Kayak, removed its flights from sale on their websites.
“While these OTA ‘pirates’ only account for a small fraction of Ryanair’s bookings, we expect the sudden removal of our flights from these OTA websites to reduce short term load factors by 1% or 2% in December and January and also to soften short term yields as we respond by making more low fares available directly to consumers,” the airline said.
Ryanair suggested that the action may be the result of pressure from consumer protection agencies or a response to a December Irish High Court ruling, which granted the carrier a permanent injunction against OTAs for “screenscraping” its website.
“We do not expect this recent removal of OTA bookings will materially affect our FY’24 traffic or PAT [profit after tax] guidance,” the airline said.
“Ryanair will respond to this welcome removal of our flights from OTA websites, by lowering fares where necessary to encourage all passengers to book directly on Ryanair.com.”
Ryanair pointed out that its continues to make its fares available to OTAs such as Google Flights “who do not add hidden mark ups to Ryanair prices and who direct passengers to make their bookings directly on the Ryanair.com website”.
Europe’s largest low cost carrier flew 12.54 million passengers last month at a load factor of 91% as it operated more than 72,500 flights.
The December performance saw the airline end the year with a 13% jump in annual carryings to 181.8 million compared with 160.4 million in 2022.
Rival Wizz Air’s December carryings rose by almost 19% over the same month a year earlier.
The central and European budget airline flew almost five million passengers, a rise of 18.8% over December 2022.
The airline ended 2023 with annual carryings up by 32% to 60.3 million as capacity rose by 26% to 66.4 million seats.
Wizz Air’s Abu Dhabi arm achieved a record year with more than three million passengers carried on 15,000 flights on a fleet of 12 aircraft serving 40 destinations in 27 countries.