They need to think about laying on additional 1,000 flights for the coming few months and increasing their capacity by 25% (XL's market share) for the future. Majority of these people will still want a holiday.
Superpilot you're basing your assumptions on a couple of things there! Firstly that the other carriers are running at 100 percent load factors which they are not and the other is that people will still want to travel when they have the fear of loosing their job. Thus any increase will be able to be accommodated in the current flying schedule which pretty much rules out expansion.
If you watched the news you would have seen a lot of those people had bought their holidays last year when times were still relatively good, now fast forward a couple of months and look at it again. Vastly different picture!
Things are bad make no doubt about it. While perversely its good that XL went out of business because it ensures the survival of the other airlines for the moment, don't for one moment think that because of this that the remaining airlines will expand.
Far from it. You will probably see more route restructuring with airlines dropping frequency on loss/slim margin routes and bumping up frequency on decent routes. The name of the game for any airline now is survival.
People whilst I admire always trying to look at the glass half full there has to come a time when you call a spade a spade! Prospects are not looking good for low time guys. Personally I wouldn't be suprised if the hiring freeze at ezy and ryr continues longer than planned as its forecast on growth of the market and retirements/ people moving on/upgrades etc. Take any of those away and you won't have any hiring at all.