EasyJet on Thursday (20 July) revealed a third-quarter (three months to 30 June) pre-tax profit of £203 million, an improvement of £317 million compared with the same quarter last year.
This was driven by year-on-year passenger growth of 7%, growth in revenue per seat of 23% year-on-year, a 2% year-on-year improvement in load factor to 90% and increases in both ticket yield per passenger (+22%) and ancillary yield per passenger (+20%).
EasyJet holidays, meanwhile, tripled its Q3 pre-tax profit from £16 million to £49 million and more than doubled its Q3 revenue from £117 million to £237 million, with easyJet confident it will deliver a full-year pre-tax profit of in excess of £100 million.
"Our Q3 performance has been underpinned by strong passenger demand for easyJet’s network and services," said easyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren.
However, easyJet’s performance comes against a tough operating backdrop, with its guidance for the summer season – record profit before tax and a 10% increase in revenue per seat – subject to the "operational environment" with "the whole industry seeing challenging conditions this summer".
"More constrained airspace and flow rate restrictions are resulting in unprecedented ATC disruption, as well as increased ATC strike days up 40% year to date versus 2019," said easyJet, which recently confirmed it would cancel 1,700 flights to and from Gatwick this summer, blaming these very issues.
Earlier this month, Europe’s ATC manager Eurocontrol said the war in Ukraine had reduced available European airspace by around 20%.
The carrier said its management team had taken action to mitigate the impact on customers, with Lundgren adding: "We are absolutely focused on mitigating the impact of the challenging external environment on our customers and flying them on their well-earned holidays.
"We continue to see good momentum as we move into Q4 [three months to 30 September] where we will be operating more than 160,000 flights and expect to deliver another record profit before tax performance.This winter we are adding more than 15% capacity and we see bookings ahead of the same period last year.”
EasyJet flew 26.2 million seats during Q3, a 5% increase on the same quarter last year from 24.9 million, with load factors consistently around 90%.
