The aviation industry could have some good news, so here’s a little bit: EasyJet said Tuesday that it saw “higher-than-expected levels of demand” last month, with 84% of its seats occupied. It now plans to further increase capacity to 40% this quarter.
However, the news must be viewed in context: EasyJet, Europe’s fourth-largest airline by number of passengers, has been more cautious returning to the skies than other low-cost European airlines such as Ryanair and Wizz Air.
Meanwhile, Ryanair has already regained 40% of its capacity during the same month, which may partly explain why it only filled 72% of its seats. Wizz Air also revved its engines more aggressively and finished with a 60.5% load factor.
However, it appears that demand is returning faster than anticipated. (Whether that demand could be called “healthy” is another matter, given that the willingness of Europeans to go abroad during their summer holidays appears to be driving further increases in COVID-19 across the region.)
Managing director Johan Lundgren said in a statement, “I am very encouraged that we saw higher than demand levels in July with 84% load factor, continuing to be popular with customers in places like Far & Nees.” . . “Our reservations for the rest of the summer have been performing better than expected and, as a result, we have decided to expand our program during the [program] quarter so that approximately 40% of capacity is in flight.”
EasyJet’s share price was up more than 10% on the news, and even Ryanair’s was up 7.3%.
The previous quarter, of course, was not very good. The EasyJet fleet was completely on the ground from late March to mid-June, so the only action took place in the last two weeks of June: 117,000 passengers were carried on just 10 aircraft that had a total capacity of 132,000 seats, creating an impressive -if-no-per-context-load factor of 88.9%.
On the positive side, EasyJet said its customer satisfaction level was up to 80%, which is 13 points higher than in the same period last year. He said this was due to their better biosecurity measures, such as disinfecting their ship every day and requiring everyone to wear weak masks.
