Ryanair carried 9.5 million passengers in December 2021, four times more than it did in December 2020. However, this was 700,000 fewer than it carried in November and marked the first time the Irish airline’s monthly carryings have dropped below 10 million since July 2021.

Load factor was 81%, up from 73% in December 2020 but down from 86% in November 2021. Last month, Ryanair reduced its December traffic expectations from a range of 10 to 11 million passengers to somewhere in the region of nine to 9.5 million.

Additionally, Ryanair has pre-emptively cut January capacity by a third from around 10 million to somewhere between six and seven million, and also expects to post a deeper full-year net loss (year to 31 March 2022) of €250-€450 million. It was previously forecasting a net loss of €100-€200 million.

Wizz Air, by comparison, carried just shy of 3.5 million passengers in December 2021 on a load factor of 75.4%, up from around 1.2 million in December 2020 when the load factor was 56.1%. In contrast to Ryanair, though, Wizz was able to record a month-on-month increase in traffic, up from 2.17 million in November 2021, suggesting it suffered less of an impact from the Omicron variant.