Today we provided a trading update to the market on
our performance in Q1.
As you can see from our statement this morning we managed to improve our results in the first quarter despite a significant impact from the conflict in the Middle East. This underscores our resilience, effective strategy and our capability to navigate challenges. With passenger increase of 14% year on year, we are on track to meet our growth expectations for FY24. easyJet holidays continues to perform strongly with customer numbers up by 48% in Q1 and delivering £30m profit in the period which is a significant improvement from last year.
Here are some further highlights from
the announcement:
- We flew 23.0 million seats, up from 20.2 million last year
- Ancillary revenue up 20% on last year
- easyJet holidays profit increased 131% to £30 million
To put it into context, during the peak of our busy sales period we were filling two aircraft a minute as customers booked trips to their favourite destinations.
In Q1 we also took important steps to strengthen our business for the longer term. In December we gained shareholder approval for the acquisition of 157 A320 neo family aircraft for delivery between FY29 and FY34, finalised a purchase agreement with our engine supplier CFM, and further reduced our debt.
Although it is still early, we see positive momentum in bookings for flights and holidays for the summer period. Flight bookings and RPS for H2 ’24 are up on last year and we expect customer growth in holidays to exceed 35% for the full year.
Our improved year on year performance and positive outlook position us to make progress towards our ambitious medium-term targets of delivering over £1 billion profit before tax, driven by reducing winter losses, upgauging our fleet further growth for easyJet holidays and delivering a number of other important initiatives we already have plans for and started to implement.