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Despite various disruptions and having to cancel up to 20,000 flights this year, Ryanair (LON:RYA) is still confident in making record-breaking profits this year.
The airline is expecting a full-year profit of up to €1.45 billion following €1.29 billion in profit in the six months to the end of September.
“We see no reason to alter our full-year profit after-tax guidance which remains in a range of €1.40bn to €1.45bn,” said Ryanair on Tuesday.
The budget airline said that they took advantage of higher ancillary revenues and the lower cost of fuel, despite lower fares in the first half of the year.
Following a hectic autumn where Ryanair had no choice but to cancel 20,000 flights and find themselves with a lack of standby pilots, they remain confident.
“We will now move from being ‘competitive’ to offering materially higher (over 20 percent) pay with better career prospects, superior rosters, and much better job security than Norwegian, among others, can offer,” said the airline.
“We expect these measures, if/when accepted by all our pilot bases, will add some €45m to our [2018 fiscal year] crew costs (and up to €100m in a full year) but will not significantly alter the substantial unit cost advantage we have over all other EU airline competitors.”
The cancelled flights are estimated to cost the airline €50 million, which has led to the airline slow down growth plans for 2018.
Chief financial officer Neil Sorahan remains “absolutely confident” that they will have enough standby pilots by next summer to avoid future mishaps.
According to Sorahan, the issue over autumn fell down to human error.
Michael O’Leary, the airline’s chief executive, said: “These strong H1 results reinforce the robust nature of Ryanair’s low fare, pan-European growth model, even during a period which suffered a material failure in our pilot rostering function.”