Ryanair's traffic numbers continue to improve in August with uncertainty ahead
Source: Xinhua | 2020-09-03
Europe's largest budget airline Ryanair said on Wednesday that it carried a total of 7 million passengers in August, up 59 percent over the previous month.
Ryanair's traffic numbers had shown a consistent improvement on a month-on-month basis after plunging to a nadir in April when only 40,000 passengers were handled by the airline, down 99.6 percent when compared with the same month of last year.
In May, Ryanair handled 70,000 passengers. By June, the figure rose to 400,000. In July when Ryanair resumed 40 percent of its flight capacity, the figure further increased to 4.4 million, according to the monthly traffic figures released by the airline.
Nevertheless, the number of passengers carried by Ryanair in August is still 53 percent lower when compared with the 14.9 million passengers carried by the airline in August 2019.
Earlier last month, Ryanair said that it would cut its flight capacity by 20 percent in September and October due to the travel restrictions reimposed by some European countries following the resurgence of COVID-19 cases in these countries.
Ryanair said that most of these cuts would be frequency reductions rather than route closures.
Ryanair operates over 1,800 flight routes in Europe and North Africa and 90 percent of them had been reopened from the beginning of July after nearly all of Ryanair's flight routes were closed towards the end of March due to the impact of the pandemic.
Ryanair predicts that it may take at least two or three years for its traffic numbers to return to normal levels.
Headquartered in Ireland, Ryanair carried over 140 million passengers in 2019.
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