Ryanair warns flight prices to Europe will rise this summer

There is high demand for European beach holidays, which will lead to higher plane ticket prices this summer.

Michael O'Leary said he expects prices for flights to rise by a high single-digit percentage.

He said that the airline's lower fares were helping the company recover from the Pandemic.

He hoped the airline would return to reasonable profitability in the current financial year.

The firm reported an annual loss of 355 million dollars on Monday, saying that the recovery from Covid restrictions had been impacted by the war in Ukraine.

Russia is a major supplier of fossil fuels and jet fuel and is at risk of being disrupted by the conflict in Ukraine.

The group lost less than expected and was down from the previous year.

Mr O'Leary said he expected prices to be lower up to June compared to pre-pandemic levels, but added that he expected prices to go up over the summer.

It seems to us that there will be higher prices into that peak summer period because there is so much demand for the beaches of Europe.

I think prices will go down next winter. It is too early to say if the economic downturn will be good or bad, but the lowest-cost provider in the UK and Europe will do better in a recession.

The airline stated in its results that customers were still booking their trips later than usual and that the booking curve looked more like pre-covid times.

Thanks to the lifting of the Pandemic restrictions, traffic recovered as it carried 97.1 million guests, up from just 27.5 million the year before.

It hopes to increase this to 165 million passengers this year, which would be a new record.

There will be no last minute deals this year, but holiday giant Tui said it expects summer bookings to reach levels it hasn't seen in years.

There will be no last minute offers at low prices this summer according to the chief executive.

By the end of June, Mr O'Leary said he hoped to see the elimination of inch points at UK airports.

He said that getting through airports this summer is going to be difficult and that they are encouraging their customers to show up earlier.

He claimed that this was not the case at other airports, such as Glasgow, Stansted, and Bristol.

He said that the recruitment challenges that some competitors faced were not the same as those faced by Ryanair.

Staff were asked to take pay cuts to avoid job losses.