Ryanair has recorded its third busiest month for traffic, having flown 16 million passengers in April as it continued to benefit from pent-up demand for air travel.
The budget airline said the figure marked a 13% increase in passenger numbers compared with the same month a year earlier, when it carried just over 14 million people, as customers sought to jet off on spring getaways including during the Easter holidays.
The Irish carrier’s planes were also fairly full last month, with its average proportion of empty seats per flight falling to 6%, a level not seen since last October. Its planes usually have such a low proportion of empty seats only during the school summer holiday period.
Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, has carried more passengers in a month only twice before, in July and August last year, when it flew 16.8 million and 16.9 million passengers during the peak summer getaway season.
The airline reported that in January there had been “robust demand” for Easter and summer flights this year, partly because of the return of Asian and American travellers visiting Europe to benefit from the strength of the US dollar.
Ryanair said it had cancelled 220 flights over the most recent bank holiday weekend, spanning the end of April and the start of May, because of strikes by French air traffic control staff. It said this had affected more than 40,000 passengers.
The airline said it had been informed by French authorities that it would need to cancel at least 200 flights, most of which would have flown over France.
Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, last week criticised the strikes, calling them “completely unacceptable”.
O’Leary apologised to the passengers affected by the industrial action and called on the European Commission to “take action to protect overflights”, where a plane needs to fly across French airspace to reach its destination, saying these should not be affected by the strikes in France.
Ryanair cancelled 650 flights in April, affecting 118,000 passengers, as a result of strikes by French air traffic controllers.
