The airline said it released 100,000 seats for sale across its European network, at prices from £19.99 for travel in June, July and August. These low fare seats are available for booking until midnight Thursday.
“The Paphos 2014 schedule includes 8 routes to Brussels Charleroi, London Stansted and Rome,” said Ryanair’s Maria Macken.
She said that passengers can now “also book their flights on our much improved website and enjoy a free small second carry-on bag, “quiet flights”, allocated seats and use their personal electronic devices at all stages of their flight, with a new smartphone app, and family and business products coming soon.”
The announcement follows good news on the financial front with Ryanair Holdings Plc receiving a BBB+ rating from Fitch, matching the BBB+ recently awarded by Standard & Poor’s and making Ryanair the highest rated airline in the world. These ratings reflect the strength of Ryanair’s business model, which has a long established track record of profitability, cash generation, and a very strong balance sheet with low levels of debt.
Ryanair has undertaken these ratings reviews as part of its plan to access capital markets to source low cost financing for its new 180 Boeing 737-800 aircraft deliveries, which commence in September 2014 and will enable Ryanair to grow by 40% over the next five years from 80 million to over 112 million p.a.
On Monday, Ryanair announced full year net profit of €523 million, slightly ahead of previous guidance. Traffic grew 3% to 81.7 million passengers, revenue per passenger was flat, as strong ancillary revenue growth offset a 4% fall in average fares and excluding fuel, sector length adjusted unit costs fell by 3%.
Ryanair’s, Michael O’Leary, said: “While disappointing that profits fell 8% to €523 million due mainly to a 4% decline in fares, weaker sterling, and higher fuel costs, we reacted quickly to this environment last September by lowering fares and improving our customer experience which caused H2 traffic to grow 4% as load factors rose 1%. Ancillary revenues grew 17%, much faster than traffic growth, and now accounts for 25% of total revenues.”
“We recently opened 4 new bases at Athens, Brussels, Lisbon and Rome. These are performing ahead of expectation as customers switch from high fare carriers to Ryanair’s lower fares and industry leading customer service. We announced three new bases for winter 2014 in Cologne, Gdansk, and Warsaw. We expect these new bases will provide significant growth opportunities as we start deliveries (Sept 2014) of our new Boeing 737-800 NG aircraft order.”
“We have broadened our distribution by becoming the first low fares airline in Europe to partner with Google’s “Flight Search” function, which is now available in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Ireland, Poland and Spain (and more countries follow shortly). This partnership enables consumers to easily access and book Ryanair’s lower fares every time they search on Google.”
Source: Financial Mirror
