Looks like a new route or two for BFS for summer! On another aviation website! And increasing from 6 based to 7 based for summer! Anyone on here have any other info on this?

Cheers :)

I travel everywhere with easyJet on staff travel. This has been the most challenging winter to get seats at any time. I think it certainly is a true statistic and not too good to be true.

Take Belfast as an example. They have scaled back some route frequency London overall but more notably some of the Euro routes, couple that with Aer Lingus not being on these routes over winter e.g. ALC, goes from 5/6 a week down to 3, Malaga, similar.

In other markets they had reduced frequency, bmibaby is gone, Spanair is gone, Malev, airline closures, the market has been tighting up, hence easyJet seats more on demand. Also Ryanair reduction in fly programme assisting to some extent I would say in similar markets?

Carolyn has clearly said that staff travel availability would be down, and this is due to the demand they are seeing at the moment.

Furthermore, there is a lot of positivity around about easyJet and their addition of pre assigned seats etc. easyJet's strategy of modest growth and 'low' fares to convenient airports paying off so much so that they will be in FTE 100!!

EI-BUD

Racedo, loadfactor is loadfactor. It is independant of plane type. It is the percentage of offered seats sold. It is a raw number and any comments about yield and other derivatives is pure speculation.

Furthermore, the ezy specification is 156/180 seats. However, that is still completely irrelevant to loadfactor as LF is still a percentage. You get less passengers moved with 90% LF on a A319 than on a A320, but that is, again, besides the point. Operating costs differ between the two, naturally.

If you want a view over the financial performance of a route/season, you need a lot more than just a loadfactor. Good luck trying to get an airline to give you access to their yield monitoring.

Let us not forget gentlemen that Racedo is our resident Ryanair representative on PPrune although of course he will deny it!

Is he the successor to Leo Hairy Camel...for those long enough on here to remember :E

No disagreement but a 90% load factor on a A320 v A319 means flogging another 22 seats on a flight.

An all A320 fleet would require a 12% increase in tickets sold to maintain same load factor.

Have always been very clear I am not a rep for anyone on this site.

I have no reason to lie so less of the accusations you can't back up.

The fact Ryanair has to park up a proportion of its fleet and trim schedules more dramatically than Easy during winter to achieve anything remotely close to Easy's load factor suggest to me that Easy got it right in having a 156 seater than having to struggle filling a fleet wholly made up of 180 seaters.

Just MHO.

edited due fat fingers, poor eye sight and small keypad.

Haha love that comment :}

Gentlemen, cut out the snide. It is NOT interesting and is unneccessary.

PPP

I've worked exclusively in the 320 this winter from LGW and I can truthfully say that I have never had less than 176 pax on any flight. They constantly go out oversold with one or two nit taking the flight. So the high load factor is correct. 3 years ago we old take 30 or 40 pax on a flight In jan but not any more!

Can we ask how Easy handle overbookings ? Experience of the majors doing this but not LCCs procedures. Any asking for volunteers ? What is offered ?

I was recently told EZY do not overbook from a revenue point of view but only as a result of operational reasons. Compensation is always offered and volunteers requested. If no volunteers and essential offloads required, its last to check in. Seems reasonable.

Pardon my ignorance but do easyJet over-book? :O

Just the question I wanted to ask too, Jack, but I thought I was being ignorant as well!

On some routes yes and others not. Generally not on the charter destinations as most people show up, but there is regularly overbookings on business routes. On these routes, it is not uncommen to have 5-10 people not showing up, thus leaving departure airport with quite a few empty seats despite a few overbookings.

I can see the reasoning behind that but is it really worth it?

If 5-10 people don't show up to the airport, they have still paid for their flight so surely any airline would benefit somewhat by having empty seats, because it means less people and bags on the plane which would save fuel, time and money whilst still getting the revenue by the payment of those who didn't turn up.

By overbooking, for 156 seats on an aircraft, Easyjet can sell tickets to 165 people and gain the extra revenue while knowing it is extremely unlikely 156 people will turn ip at the gate. Yes, that's an extra 400 or 500 pounds per sector just by doing some statistical analysis of previous passenger records. 6 sectors per day across a large fleet comes to seriously big cash per year - well worth the cost of a few statisticians on the payroll and the fairly rare EU261 denied boarding compensation.

I see the company has joined the FTSE100 - haven´t heard any comments from Stelios yet!

I was told years ago that 'officially' ez did not overbook. How could a computer put more people on a flight than seats? Someone suggested they might on some routes and not others. I suppose a computer could do that. It might be common for business men commuters to make multiple early bookings on Mondays & Fridays at the lowest pricers and then throw away the unused.However, the excellent policy of allowing you onto an earlier flight, space available, might negate that idea. Sadly, this allowance is only on the return sector of the same booking reference. Why do they have such a good customer convenience idea and then make it restrictive? People often book a single out & then back. This does not allow you to catch an earlier flight.
Overbooking on the business weekend flights is highly lucrative as the few over bookings will be at the highest prices. Statistics will show how real the gamble is and it could be a nice little earner.