Free seats due to bans from travel websites: Ryanair records a decrease in flight load
Ryanair planes are flying with empty seats due to a ban on sales from travel websites. In the first month of 2024, the company carried 12.2 million passengers, up 3 percent from the same month last year, but the share of occupied seats on flights dropped to 89 percent.
The decline in the airline's profits is due to a conflict with several travel agency websites, including Booking.com, Kiwi, and Kayak. Yahoo News reported that Ryanair offered discounted tickets to customers and repeatedly called travel sites "pirates", saying they took part of the profits, after which the sites stopped cooperating with the Irish carrier.
In addition, due to the rise in fuel prices in the last 3 months of 2023, the company made a profit that was 93% less than a year earlier, which forced Ryanair to lower its annual profit forecast by €10 million, reaching €1.95 billion.
This result directly hit the airline's CEO, Michael O'Leary, who could have received a bonus of €100 million in the event of a €2.2 billion profit.