Ryanair on Thursday said it will further cut its flight schedules from January through March in reaction to newly announced Covid lockdowns in Ireland, the UK, and a number of other EU countries. Europe’s largest low-cost airline now expects its January traffic to fall to under 1.25 million passengers and that the new Covid restrictions could result in traffic falling to as little as 500,000 passengers in February and in March.
The service cuts, scheduled to start January 21, will result in “few, if any, flights” operated to and from Ireland or the UK until the governments jettison what the airline calls “draconian” travel restrictions.
These new cuts will reduce the airline's fiscal year 2021 traffic forecast from “below 35 million” to between 26 million and 30 million passengers, it projected. Ryanair added that it does not expect cuts and further traffic reductions to materially affect its net loss for the fiscal year ending March 31 because it already expected many of the routes to lose money.
“Ryanair calls on the Irish and UK governments to accelerate the slow pace of vaccine rollouts, and in particular, calls on the Irish government to explain why Denmark, with a population of five million, has vaccinated 40,000 citizens…whereas Ireland, with a similar five million population, has vaccinated just 4,000, a vaccination rate that is 10 times slower than that of Denmark,” said the airline in a statement.
“The WHO has previously confirmed that governments should do everything possible to avoid brutal lockdowns because lockdowns do not get rid of the virus,” said a Ryanair spokesman. “Ireland’s Covid-19 travel restrictions are already the most stringent in Europe, and so these new flight restrictions are inexplicable and ineffective when Ireland continues to operate an open border between the Republic and the North of Ireland.”