Ryanair, the largest airline in Europe, recently released its (revised) winter schedule. Due to increased flight restrictions imposed by EU governments, air travel to and from much of Central Europe, the UK, Ireland, Austria, Belgium and Portugal has been severely restricted. As a result, forward bookings fell slightly in October, but fell significantly in November and December. In view of these declines in bookings and Ryanair's plan to operate at 70% load factor, Ryanair has further reduced its winter schedule (November - March) from 60% to 40% from the previous year. 

Ryanair expects to maintain 65% of its winter route network, but with reduced frequencies. In addition to closing bases in Cork, Shannon and Toulouse in the winter, Ryanair has announced significant cuts to base aircraft in Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Vienna. With this greatly reduced winter capacity and load factor of approx. 70%, Ryanair now expects year-round (FY21) traffic to drop to around 38 million guests, although this directive could be further downgraded if EU governments arrive this winter deal even worse with air travel and impose more lockdowns. Ryanair reports this on their website.

Michael O'Leary, Ryanair CEO, said:

“We have continued to expand our capacity in September and October to reflect both market conditions and evolving government restrictions, with the goal of maintaining a 70% occupancy rate, allowing us to play a tie and minimize losses. While the Covid situation remains volatile and difficult to predict, we now need to reduce our year-round traffic forecast to 38 million guests. While we deeply regret these cuts in winter schedules, they have been forced upon us by government mismanagement of EU air travel. Our focus remains on maintaining as large a schedule as we can operate wisely to keep our aircraft, pilots and cabin crew up to date and on service while minimizing job losses. Given the magnitude of these cuts, it is inevitable that this winter we will implement more unpaid leave and job sharing in those bases where we have agreed to cut less working time and pay, but this is a better outcome in the short term than massive job cuts. Unfortunately, there will be more layoffs on that small number of cabin crew bases, where we still have no agreement on working time and pay cuts, which is the only alternative. In the meantime, we urge all EU governments to immediately and completely adopt the European Commission's traffic light system, which allows safe air travel between EU states on a regional basis (without flawed travel restrictions) for those countries and regions of the world. Europe, who can show that their Covid cases are less than 50 per 100.000 inhabitants ”.

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