Irish airline Ryanair expects to carry half fewer passengers by March next year due to the corona crisis. In addition, the company warned in its trading update of a record loss in the current quarter. Things should improve a bit from July, the company hopes to resume a large part of its flights.

Ryanair expects to carry 80 million travelers this fiscal year, which runs until the end of March 2021. Before the corona crisis, the target was almost twice as high. The current quarter accounts for a large part of the decline. Since mid-March, Ryanair has been flying with a very stripped-down schedule due to government measures to address the coronavirus outbreak. That is why the budget flyer expects to record a loss of more than 200 million euros for the current quarter.

Ryanair hopes that there will be some recovery in the months that follow. The loss in the third quarter should therefore be smaller than in the second quarter. Ryanair hopes to operate approximately 1,000 flights daily from July 1. This means that the vast majority of the network is taken back into service. According to financial director Neil Sorahan, there is an improvement in the number of bookings.

“People look forward to August and September to go to the sun before children have to go back to school.”

Ryanair, which previously denied state aid to competitors as “doping”, further reported that it had taken on a £ 600 million loan, amounting to € 671 million, which the United Kingdom has guaranteed. The airline is currently pursuing a legal battle against billions in aid to Air France-KLM, Lufthansa, Alitalia and SAS, among others. According to Sorahan, the Ryanair loan is disproportionate to the amount of state aid received by Air France-KLM, among others.

In its past fiscal year, Ryanair carried nearly 149 million passengers, up slightly from a year earlier. Profits rose to 1 billion euros, from 885 million euros in 2019.