The travel plans of almost 400,000 Ryanair passengers will be disrupted by a move by the budget carrier to fly 25 fewer aircraft, cancel 18,000 flights and suspend 34 routes over winter.
The decision to reduce operations comes as a “roster failure” in September saw it over-allocate months of pilot leave as it moves to a holiday system based on the calendar year.
Also affected are 315,000 customers on 2100 flights previously cancelled over a six-week period in September and October
The budget carrier said the latest decision would affect about 1 per cent of its customers and “less than one flight per day” across its 200 airports over the five-month winter period from November to March.
The 34 suspended routes include services within and from the UK as well as flights within continental Europe.
Europe’s biggest budget carrier, Ryanair currently has a fleet of 400 aircraft, employs more than 4200 pilots and operates over 800,000 flights annually. It says the reduced flying will create 25 spare aircraft and more than 100 extra standby pilots a day.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary apologised to customers.
“While over 99 per cent of our 129m customers will not have been affected by any cancellations or disruptions, we deeply regret any doubt we caused existing customers last week about Ryanair’s reliability, or the risk of further cancellations,’’ O’Leary said.
“From today, there will be no more rostering related flight cancellations this winter or in summer 2018.
“Slower growth this winter, will create lots of spare aircraft and crews which will allow us to manage the exceptional volumes of annual leave we committed to delivering in the nine months to December, 2017. “
The budget carrier has emailed affected customers and offered them a €40 (€80 return) travel voucher to allow them to book new flights between October and March.
But reports emerged Thursday that it could face action by the UK Civil Aviation Authority for misleading passengers over their rights.
The Guardian reported that the CAA told the airline it was wrong to tell passengers affected by the first wave of cancellations that it did not have arrange new flights for them nad failing to tell those in the latest move they could be re-routed on other carriers.
Ryanair estimated the overall costs of the two waves of cancellations at less than €50m and said it did not expect the moves to affect its after-tax profit guidance of €1.40bn to €1.45bn.
But it warned shareholders to expect a reduction in the rapid growth to which they had become accustomed.
“Our monthly growth from Nov 17 to March 18 will slow from 9 per cent to 4 per cent,’’ it said. “Our full-year traffic of 131m will now moderate to 129m, which is 7.5 per cent up on last year.
“By slowing our summer 2018 fleet growth from 445 to 435 aircraft, we expect traffic to March 2019 will slow from 142m to 138m, a 7 per cent rate of growth.”
The airline said it would still buy 50 new Boeing 737 aircraft between Sept 17 and May 18 as well as 20 aircraft in the winter of 2018/19.
It also rejected claims there was a pilot shortage at the airline, saying less than 100 captains and 160 first officer has left in the past year, mainly due to retirement or moves to long-haul operators.
It said it had recruited and would train more than 650 pilots to replace those leaving and crew new aircraft.
Ryanair pilots have blasted the airline amid calls to unionise over working conditions.
