Unloved during the pandemic as their businesses were incapacitated almost overnight, airlines that cut back to survive the crisis are now blowing through profit forecasts and luring back investors.
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DUBLIN (Reuters) -Ryanair expects a record loss of close to 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) in the year to March 31 before what Chief Executive Michael O’Leary says will be a “dramatic recovery” later in the year thanks to COVID-19 vaccination programmes.
The Irish low-cost airline, Europe’s largest, forecast a loss between 850 million and 950 million euros in its current financial year - about five times larger than its previous record loss in 2009.
But O’Leary told an investor call that bookings would “snap back very strongly” once confidence grows in the rollout of vaccines across the European Union.
“I would be reasonably confident . that we will see a return to relatively high-volume travel in that key July, August, September quarter,” he said.