EasyJet targets another bumper summer of record profits

EasyJet is targeting a second consecutive summer of record profits as it said the deepening conflict in the Middle East was not deterring customers from booking holidays. The low-cost airline said bookings for the northern hemisphere summer “continue to build well” in an update on Thursday, while ticket prices were at present tracking higher than last year. “We move into the summer period with confidence we can deliver another record summer performance,” easyJet’s CE Johan Lundgren said on Thursday. His comments come after the airline swung back to profit last year following a post-pandemic travel boom. Lundgren cautioned that the airline had not made any formal forecasts for the summer, but that revenue per seat, an important industry metric, was higher than a year ago. The airline made record pre-tax profits of GBP866m for the six months between April and September last year. EasyJet said it had also not seen any hit to consumer confidence from the Iranian missile strike on Israel in the early hours of Sunday, which has raised fears of a regional conflict in the Middle East. “We are looking at this on a daily basis, and there was no impact on bookings,” Lundgren said. In contrast, the start of regional tensions in October last year cost it GBP40m, as the airline cancelled flights to Tel Aviv and Jordan, while easyJet estimated it lost a further GBP40m from a wider slowdown in bookings across Europe for about six weeks in the final quarter of last year. The airline had suspended flights to Israel over the summer, it said, and redeployed the limited capacity elsewhere in its network. Despite that hit, the airline on Thursday forecast pre-tax losses of between GBP340mn and GBP360mn for the six months ending in March, better than analysts had predicted and down from losses of GBP411m a year earlier.<br/>