Writing in the company’s annual report, executive chairman Philip Meeson said both factors “lead us to conclude that in the medium-term prices are likely to come under some pressure”.
However, he said the package holiday was “a higher yielding, resilient and popular product in difficult economic times, and the Mediterranean and Canary Islands are evergreen destinations where people absolutely want to go”.
He added: “The control of our own seat supply and our frequency of flying allow us to offer truly variable duration holidays, critical in allowing our customers the ability to flex their holiday arrangements to suit their individual budgets.”
Meeson added all-inclusives were also “a wonderful product for challenging economic times”.
Jet2 said demand continued to strengthen, but with customers booking “a little later than normal”.
“Additionally, package holiday bookings remain encouraging and are displaying a materially higher mix of the total, up 13 percentage points.”
Average load factors for summer 2022 are currently 1.4 points behind summer 2019 at the same point despite a 14% increase in seat capacity, with pricing “robust”.
Jet2 has fully hedged its fuel needs for summer 2022 and 75% for winter 22/23.
Meeson has been critical of airports’ lack of preparation for travel’s restart. He continued his criticism in the report.
“Inexcusably, many suppliers simply did not plan, prepare or invest for a normal summer season and are now suffering from the difficult employment market which has meant us incurring additional costs to recover the consequent disruption to our flying programme,” he said.
“Broadly, most of our 10 UK base airports have been woefully ill-prepared and poorly resourced for the volume of customers they could reasonably expect, as have other suppliers, such as onboard caterers and providers of Airport PRM (Passengers with Reduced Mobility) services.
“Inexcusable, bearing in mind our flights have been on sale for many months and our load factors are quite normal.”
During the financial year, Jet2 made a loss before tax of £388.8 million, compared to a deficit of £369.9 million in 2021. Commission paid to agents rose from £9 million to £29.5 million.
Looking ahead, Meeson said the coming year “very much depends on how quickly the broader aviation sector returns to some level of stability, as well as strength of bookings for the remainder of summer and the second half of the financial year, a period for which we still have limited visibility”.
