Stansted: Ryanair and easyJet report increased passenger numbers

Budget airline rivals easyJet and Ryanair both enjoyed increased passenger numbers last month, according to figures out today.

EasyJet carried 4.23million people in February, a 2.9 per cent rise on February last year while Ryanair’s passenger numbers for last month grew 7 per cent to 4.5m.

EasyJet’s planes flew 90.7 per cent full in February compared with 90.5 per cent in February last year and Ryanair’s planes were 78 per cent full, up from 77 per cent for February 2013.

Robin Kiely of Ryanair said: “Ryanair traffic grew by 300,000 to 4.5m customers in February, thanks to the success of our lower fares, our easier to use website and our recent customer service improvements including allocated seats for all customers and the use of personal electronic devices on all flights.

“Further improvements will be rolled out over the coming months as Ryanair continues to lower prices and improve our industry leading customer service.”

Ryanair and easyJet are both major operators out of Stansted and have reached new long-term agreements with owner MAG, which acquired the airport from the former BAA group a year ago, to increase capacity there,

Last week, Ryanair announced extra flights on nine Stansted routes, to Bologna, Dublin, Lanzarote, Marrakech, Paphos, Riga, Salzburg, Santiago & Tours, from this summer.

These increases are in addition to 13 new Stansted routes already announced by Ryanair, to Athens, Basel, Bordeaux, Brive, Bucharest, Comiso, Dortmund, Lisbon, Osijek, Podgorica, Prague, Rabat and Skelleftea, which will start in April, and extra flights on its Berlin, Bremen, Eindhoven, Knock and Milan routes.