Ryanair - Q2 2025

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good morning and welcome to the Ryanair H1 Results call. My name is Adam, and I'll be your operator for today. If you'd like to ask a question in the Q&A portion of today's call, you may do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to Ryanair Group CEO, Michael O'Leary, to begin, so please go ahead.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Ryanair H1 Results conference call. We're joined by all the members of the team from different parts of the globe, and we will. I'm going to run through quick highlights, ask Neil Sorahan, our Group CFO, as usual, to give you a comment on the financial highlights, and then we will maximize the time for Q&A. So you'll have seen this morning we reported H1 after-tax profits of €1.8 billion, 18% lower than the prior year H1 profit of €2.18 billion. Highlights of the half-year were traffic, strong growth, 9% to a record of 115 million. It would have been higher, but for the repeated Boeing delays. The key theme is average fares fell in the half-year by 10%, but the trend is improving.

We were down 15% in Q1, down 7% in Q2, and we returned to Q3 when we took a forward guidance. We have 170 737 Gamechangers in a 608 aircraft fleet at the end of the half, and that had risen to 172 by the end of October. We have five new bases, 200 new routes open this summer. The approved OTA partnerships now cover about over 90% of all OTAs. These protect consumers from being overcharged by OTAs. We give OTAs direct feed into the ryanair.com website, but in return, they guarantee that the customer will get only the Ryanair prices. We also get the customer email, accurate customer email, and accurate customer credit cards, so we have a direct relationship with every customer now booking through approved OTAs.

I think, again, our strong balance sheet has enabled us to take a very strong fuel hedging position, where 85% hedged for the second half of FY25 at $79 a barrel. We've jumped on recent points of weakness to increase our FY26 cover to 75% at $77 per barrel. We completed the $700 million share buyback in August, and as of today, we've done just over 30% of the $800 million follow-on share buyback. We expect that buyback will continue. We'll probably run out until about April, May of 2025. And the board on Friday confirmed the interim dividend of $22.30 per dividend or dividend per share has been declared to be paid in February 2022. Looking back at the half-year, ancillary revenues were resilient, rising 10% to $2.74 billion, slightly ahead of our 9% traffic growth. I think the key metric, though, is that operating costs performed well.

They rose 8%, lagging behind the 9% traffic growth, as the fuel hedging savings offset higher staff and other costs due in part to Boeing delivery delays. We found ourselves gearing up for Boeing deliveries last summer, but being overcrewed, overstaffed, and then finishing about 5 million passengers short of where we were originally going to be. Yet, if you take the half-year, operating costs rose slightly less than traffic. The balance sheet remained strong. Gross cash at the end of the half-year was over €3.3 billion. Net cash was just €600 million at the 30th of September, and that is despite paying out €900 million in CapEx, €900 million in share buybacks, and a €200 million final dividend in H1. We own our entire Boeing 737 fleet. That's 580 aircraft.

It's fully unencumbered, and this, I think, materially widens Ryanair's cost advantage over our competitors in Europe, almost all of whom now are exposed to expensive financing costs and leasing costs. As I said, we expect to complete the $800 million follow-on buyback program sometime in mid-2025. When we finish that, Ryanair will have returned almost €9 billion, including dividends to shareholders since 2008, and we'll have bought back approximately 36% of our original issued share capital. In terms of fleet and growth, so at the end of October, we had 172 Gamechangers in our fleet. We now expect the remaining nine Q3 deliveries, as the deliveries due in October and November, December, would be delayed into Q4, so we're hopeful we get those in January, February, March, if the Boeing strike settles reasonably quickly.

However, there's no doubt that we're going to now miss some of when we take those nine aircraft in Q4. That leaves us with 29 more aircraft to take for summer 2025. Boeing had originally penciled in to deliver those this winter. We now think it's reasonable, and we have no guidance on this, but to delay about half of those aircraft. So we think we get about 15 of those 29 aircraft prior to the end of June, in other words, in time for summer 2025, but half of them will be delayed into the winter of 2025-2026. And accordingly, that means I think it's sensible now we begin to walk back our original schedule of traffic. Originally, for FY25, we had expected to carry 205 million passengers. Because of the Boeing delays, we've had to walk that back to 200 million.

In fact, I think we've come in a shade just under 200 million on the full year. The original target for FY26 was 215 million passengers. We're now going to have to walk that back, I think, to about 210, with the possibility that it may have to get shaved more. It might come back to 209, 208, entirely dependent on whenever Boeing settles the strike and then can give us some reasonably accurate update delivery on aircraft. We are working closely with Boeing. I speak to Stephanie Pope on a weekly basis. Votes were again on Friday. There's a labor voting on the new pact today and hope to have a result tonight. I'm impressed, by the way, at the work that she and Kelly Ortberg have done. They're there. They're on the ground in Seattle. You can lift the phone. You can talk to somebody.

That was something that wasn't there under the previous management. She is busting her gut to try to get us deliveries. In fact, even during the strike, they brought in management. We had two aircraft ready for delivery when the strike started. They brought in extra management and got those two aircraft out to us during October. So they're doing everything they can, and they have our full support. I think, though, this is a positive generally for the industry. We are going to be short aircraft ourselves for FY25. We're going to be more short aircraft in FY26. And looking forward, if the experience this year, we were surprised by the price softness. We've come off two years in summer 2023 and summer 2024 of 20% price increases due to the post-COVID recovery. This year, we were a little bit surprised by the price softness.

We think it's due to consumer spending tightness in Europe, certainly the impact of the OTAs, and the fact that we're five million passengers short on our original target growth. But if we're constrained on our deliveries next year, we know that the rest of the European industry is heavily constrained because of the Pratt & Whitney repairs, and the OEMs are struggling to increase production. I would be, medium term, very optimistic on where pricing is going to go because of these capacity constraints. I saw some of the coverage today in Ireland and the UK, all a bit of a negative. Ryanair will be scaling back its growth ambitions.

We will still get to our 300 million passengers by 2035, as long as Boeing gets the MAX 10 certified, but we're going to have to grow a little bit slower in FY25, FY26, once we get the balance of the 29 outstanding aircraft, and that might be into summer of 2026. Then we'll be back up to our target of 225-230 million passengers. But I think these constraints should be positive for pricing into summer 2025 and summer 2026. As you're aware, the board is reviewing the airline ownership and control. We confirmed that over 49% of Ryanair issued share capital is held by EU nationals in September. We think it's appropriate to review the potential variation of either the ownership restrictions, which prohibits non-EU nationals acquiring our ordinary shares, or the voting restrictions, which is how you exercise control. That process continues.

We've consulted thus far with about 60% of our shareholders. We think it will take another three or four months, and we would hope to, the board would hope to make a decision on that, whether we are sensible to vary the ownership and/or the control sometime in the first half or the middle of 2025. Currently, the key element then, which is outlook. So at this point in time, and I say this, we have about 70% of the bookings in the system for Q3. We have only about 11% of the bookings in the system for Q4, so we have very little visibility. However, we're pretty sure at this stage we're going to finish somewhere between about 198-200 million passengers. I think the midpoint, just over 199, up about 8% on the year, subject to no worsening of the current Boeing delivery delays.

Unit costs are performing well, and we now expect full-year unit costs to be broadly flat, as our fuel hedge savings, strong interest income, and some modest aircraft delay compensation will largely offset ex-fuel cost inflation, most notably crew pay and productivity increases, higher handling and ATC costs, and the costs and inefficiency we suffered this year because of repeated Boeing 737 delays. Forward bookings into Q3 are strong, and the decline in pricing appears to be moderating. Again, what does that mean? Well, again, if I go back, Q1 pricing was down 15%. Q2 pricing is down 7%. Q3 pricing will be down by less than that, but it will be slightly down. So I think a small single-digit decline. The trend, I think, is favorable.

But then we get into Q4, and Q4, we will have a very challenging prior year comp because half of Easter was in last year's Q4. None of Easter is in this year's Q4. But at this point in time, Q3, the bookings are strong. Price declines are moderating, but we still have 30% of Q3's bookings to make, and those will be the key close in Christmas and New Year bookings. We've zero Q4 visibility, and the quarter won't benefit from last year's early Easter. That will make the prior year Q4 comps challenging. And therefore, I think it's too early this morning to provide any meaningful FY25 PAT guidance.

The final outcome will be subject to avoiding adverse developments during the remaining five months of the year, especially with the risk of outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, repeated ATC, short staffing, and capacity restrictions, and our further Boeing delivery delays. I hand over to you. Is there any comment, anything, things to highlight you'd like to throw out there to keep attention to on the balance sheet of the P&L?

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

Okay. Thanks, Michael. You covered it fairly well, but I'll just reiterate, please, with how costs went in the first half of the year. The hedging that we locked in for the year is delivering good savings, but we're focusing across all of the other lines as well, and that's enabled us now to improve the guidance on the full-year unit cost to broadly flat.

Balance sheet is rock solid, triple B plus investment grade rating over 580 aircraft unencumbered, which gives us a massive advantage over everybody else. And another reason as to why the cost advantage and the cost gap between us and everyone else is widening is because we're financing ourselves through cash when everyone else is out there raising expensive leases and expensive debt. Distribution's going well. We're about one-third of the way through the $800 million buyback, as Michael said. That'll hopefully get us out to the summer of next year. We've now locked in some modest savings on fuel hedging into next year, which is very important in this current very volatile oil market that we're in.

And then on CapEx, while we're still guiding €2.3 billion CapEx for this year, having spent about €1 billion in the first half of the year, the reality is that some of that is now likely to slip into next year. When we've got greater visibility on where and when the aircraft are coming in from Boeing, we'll revisit that, but it's a timing issue more so than anything else. And I don't think really, Michael, have much more to add.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Yeah, I think that's fine. Okay. Let's open up to Q&A, please, and I'll try to spread some of the questions around the wider management team here.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question today, that's star followed by one on your telephone keypad. And our first question comes from James Hollins from BNP Paribas. James, your line is open. Please go ahead.

James Hollins (Head of Transport and Infrastructure Research)

Yeah, thanks for that. Good morning. Yeah, just one for me, actually, so feel free to spend twice as long as you would have done on this. I think the OTA situation, I mean, it's clearly been discussed at length, well, certainly between me and my investors. Maybe any chance you could quantify what the OTA situation was, not just in Q1? I mean, it seems to be, from your comments, you very much thought that lasted into the summer. So we start to think about, I guess, fiscal 2026 and the not easy comps, but just as much detail as you can. And I think you did note it was probably a bigger impact than you had thought. So just I'd love to hear your thoughts, maybe, Eddie, if he's on as well. Thanks very much.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. I'll give you an intro on that.

Eddie, to comment on it with maybe Jason McGuinness as well. I dismissed the impact of the OTA online travel agency dispute last. It started last November, December. Now, it undoubtedly took two or three points off our load factors in the third and fourth quarters last year. I think it did hit us this summer by more than I allowed for. I mean, the one reason I was a bit dismissive is I didn't see any of these bookings going to our competitors. I mean, there was no notable bump in load factors or yields of either easyJet, Wizz or the others. But I think we've seen a strong bump in both bookings and load and for some of the tour operators this year, TUI, Jet2, etc.

So I think some of that traffic did migrate away from the OTAs and Ryanair onto the kind of tour operator side. I would, by the way, however, was it the right thing to do? Absolutely. We would fight with the OTAs again tomorrow morning and with anybody who tries to interpose themselves between us and our customers, particularly when they, by interposing themselves, they are overcharging our customers and giving us fake emails and fake payment details. Now, I'm pleased to say the relationship with, I'd say, over 90% of the OTAs is now excellent. We've only two standouts who have not yet signed up to the approved OTA deals. In other words, two OTAs who are still overcharging their customers, and that's Booking.com, although they're small in volume terms in Europe and eDreams in Spain. Other than that, everybody else has signed up.

So I think if I was, and we're guessing here, if we're looking at how much of our decline in pricing, if you take our pricing in Q1, Q2, we're down 10%. I think it's reasonable now to believe that maybe up to half of it is the OTAs and half of it is pressure on consumer spending. I don't think you can get away from the pressure on consumer spending issue. We went from two years of pricing going up 20%, 20%. We did expect to moderate this year. I mean, I thought we'd be up between 5%-10%, and we were down 10%. Sometimes it happens. There's nothing wrong with the model, and I would always sacrifice short-term fares for market share growth.

We have taken enormous quantities of market share from competitors across most of the major European markets this year, mainly because they were constrained repairing Pratt & Whitney engines or having been in the case, I think, of easyJet. They still haven't recovered their pre-COVID traffic volumes. We're operating at 40% more than our pre-COVID traffic. So I would always sacrifice short-term pricing and short-term profitability for long-term growth and longer-term gains. But I think the OTA was more damaging than I had first allowed for. The good news going forward is their forward bookings into next summer with the OTAs already very strong. Their pricing is well above our average pricing, but we would expect that because they're taking kind of their bookings from the holidays next year, whereas we're taking bookings into the winter period.

And we will have a much easier prior year comp next year. When we get to Q1 of next year, we will have both halves of Easter will be in Q1. We should have a strong flow of forward bookings coming from the OTAs, but ensuring that all of those customers who are booking through those OTAs are now getting real Ryanair prices. The OTA is free to levy a separate fee, and that's fine. But we're getting the customer email and the customer credit card details so we can interact with each customer as well. So I think that has been a very successful outcome for us, but we've no doubt taken short-term pain this year. Looking forward, as of today, we're about 2% stronger booked into summer. If you take the summer season of 2025 than we were this time last year.

Now, it's on a pretty tiny sliver of bookings, but to be two percentage points further ahead on a very small number is quite strong into next year. And we will have, I think, weaker prior year comps by the time we get to summer 2025 as well. Eddie, and maybe Jason McGuinness want to add something to that?

Eddie Wilson (Ryanair DAC CEO)

Yeah, it's Eddie here. I mean, the difficulty, James, sometimes is that when you're looking at comparisons is when you look in prior years with OTAs, it was impossible to identify who was doing what coming through the pipes because they were using other intermediaries to scrape. But what we can see now is that, as Michael has pointed out there about summer bookings, OTAs are not a sort of a homogeneous set here. They operate in different ways.

But we can definitely see the holiday ones, the new package holidays. They book further ahead and at higher fares. And if you look at that and compare it to last year, well, then if we weren't getting those bookings, then we were obviously chasing those to get load factor. But the good thing as well is that the OTAs, it's not just a question of switching on the pipe here either because some are better than others in maximizing what's coming through there. The ones that are more tech-focused have got up to speed much more quickly, and others haven't. But there's no doubt that we can see the forward bookings, particularly for the summer ones. There are bookings that we didn't get in January, particularly of last year, because when this happened broadly in mid to late November last year, you were pretty much sold into December.

So it was really those summer bookings in January, and then the effect of, obviously, the other factors of the sort of macro issues about interest rates and consumer sentiment and all that fed into it. But I echo as well what Michael said there. Look, the hard decision was to do this. It was the right thing to do. And we can see that reflected in customer issues, like some of the hardest customer issues we had. When you get to the sort of volumes that we have now, people showing up and being charged check-in fees because the OTAs are just sold on these and couldn't care less at that stage about what problems were visited upon consumers at airports. So broadly, echo it was absolutely the right thing to do, and some are better than others.

We've still a little bit to go with some of the OTAs in scaling back up to where they believe they were comparably with last year. Jason?

Jason McGuinness (Chief Commercial Officer)

Yeah, this is Jason McGuinness. If I take Q1 and Q2, so Q1, the fares are down 15%. Now, I think as much as a third of that was probably the first half of Easter moving into prior year Q4. So if you strip back Easter, and I'm doing back of the envelope here, I think Q1 pricing like for like is down somewhere between 7% and 10%. Q2 down 7%. Q3 is down by a figure between 0% and 5%. How much of that do you think is OTAs, and how much is just the consumer spending under pressure? And I know it's a guess, so. Yeah. Sorry, for me. Yeah. I don't disagree.

I think it's about half and half the interest rates inflation environment. I think last Christmas into January, the consumer was certainly weaker. I could see it in the volumes, particularly, as we said previously, across leisure and Canaries, but lots of the markets continue to book very well. Central and Eastern Europe was strong throughout the whole period. Load factors through the summer are very strong. I'm very happy how the summer is finishing out. Particularly, we've had a very strong October midterm. Hopefully, that continues into December, but a little bit too early to tell in terms of Christmas, and I agree, summer is 25, very early days so far, but I'm very happy with how it's selling, very happy with how it's selling so far. All of the markets selling well, and I think that is an indication in terms of the capacity environment as well.

I think people are booking earlier this year than they have been on the leisure and Canaries.

James Hollins (Head of Transport and Infrastructure Research)

Okay. Thanks, Jason.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Thanks, James. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Harry Gowers from J.P. Morgan. Harry, please go ahead. Your line is open. Harry.

Harry Gowers (JPMorgan)

Yeah, good morning, everyone. I've got two questions, if I can, probably both for Neil. Just on the ex-fuel costs, I mean, I think we should start to annualize some of the pay increases put through at the back end of last year. So maybe a little bit more color on what you're expecting for ex-fuel costs per pax, specifically over winter or on a full-year basis. And then related to the first one, on the delay compensation received in the first half, maybe you're able to quantify the total.

And will that continue to be a bit of a tailwind maybe for ex-fuel costs over the next 12 months or so? Thanks.

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

Okay, Harry. I'll start with the second one first. We're not going to quantify the delay compensation. It's modest, as we call out in the press release in the first half of the year. It's confidential between ourselves and Boeing and falls well short of putting us back in the money for the 5 million-plus passengers that we've lost. Will there be more in H2? The likelihood is yes. It will depend very much on how many aircraft we get and when we get them. But again, it'll be relatively modest in the overall scale of things. On unit costs themselves, total costs have done a very good job.

Absence of the Boeing compensation, we've seen some improvements on other ex-fuel cost lines in the second quarter of the year. We hope that will continue into the third and fourth, which is why we're guiding total unit costs broadly flat rather than marginally down, which we had previously. We would hope that next year, with the slower growth, we won't be overcrewed, as was the case this year. We've enough crews for about 20 more aircraft. That hopefully won't be the case into next year. And as you rightly said, as we get out into kind of the first quarter, calendar quarter of next year, we'll start to annualize some of that productivity pay that had come through. But it's too early to put numbers on where our unit costs are going to be next year.

We haven't done the budgets yet, but I think we've done a good performance this year and pleased that we're guiding broadly flat and locking in with the 75% fuel hedging that we have modest year-on-year fuel savings.

Harry Gowers (JPMorgan)

Okay. Thanks, Neil.

Thanks, Harry. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Stephen Furlong at Davy. Stephen, your line is open.

Stephen Furlong (Senior Industry Analyst)

Stephen, hi. Yeah, hi, Michael. I guess two for me. Just looking at the allocation of growth, I think you call out some scrapping of aviation taxes in Sweden, Hungary, and various regional airports. So you just might talk about that, where you see that going. And yeah, well, maybe you ask that, and then I'll come back for another one.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. And again, I'll ask Eddie joining. Look, I mean, we are tight on aircraft, so we're doing a lot more charge.

We're taking aircraft away from airports and our countries who are raising taxes. The two big callouts there would be the French budget. Now, we're small in France, even though we're the number three airline. We're taking capacity away from France. We're reducing capacity in Germany, where the government hasn't got a clue. They're not alone raising aviation tax, but also ATC fees and security charges. Even Lufthansa Group are now reducing flights significantly. They've reduced about 1,000 Eurowings flights in Hamburg. I'm medium-term optimistic on Germany. I think they'll eventually realize that either this government hasn't got a clue or this government's going to change its policy and start lowering air travel costs in Germany. Then we had the UK budget last week, where they increased APD, and a new Labour government committed to growth, got elected on a platform to drive growth.

The first thing to do is increase taxes on air travel on and off an island on the periphery of Europe. We, again, think this plays into the capacity constraint story for us next year. If we're only going to be able to deliver between 205 and 210 million passengers, there's going to be a lot more churn. I think you'll see us moving some air capacity out of Germany, France, and the UK next year. We're not able to grow in Dublin because of the traffic cap. We will be redeploying that air to get that capacity into countries who are scrapping taxes, Hungary, Sweden, who have scrapped their aviation tax entirely, which is, I think, a sign of what's to come. The home of flight shaming is now scrapping aviation tax.

They've worked out that that's not the way to grow their economy. In Italy, we're having significant success for a number of the bigger regions in Italy, Reggio Calabria, Venezia Giulia, and we hopefully Abruzzo, where Pescara Airport is, have scrapped the 650 municipal tax. We think there's a reasonable prospect that more Italian regions will scrap this Alitalia pilot pension tax. So we're redeploying churning aircraft. We will get probably 20-25 aircraft growth for next year, but our growth, if we go from 200 to 210, will slow down to about 5%. So there will be more churn.

And again, a lot of that is, we're having some very interesting discussions with some of our airports, where we're saying to them, "Look, you're at the bottom of the list of our kind of either you're one of our higher cost airports or you're," and airports are getting very, I think, realizing that they're about to lose aircraft and capacity. And that's making them, with nobody else in town, with nobody else coming over the hill, because of capacity constraints in Europe, and the costs are getting a lot more aggressive. So I think you'll see us reallocate a lot of our significant proportion of our aircraft capacity next year to those states and those airports who are lowering taxes and lowering fees to incentivize growth. And I think that's why the traffic cap in Dublin is so damaging. We've just opened a second runway.

It takes Dublin's capacity to 60 million passengers, but we have a pudding of a transport minister, a green transport minister, who thankfully is not running for election because he probably wouldn't get reelected anyway. We would hope the election is going to be called next week, that the new government, the first thing the new government would do would be scrap the tax. We had a very, I think, good hearing in the High Court on Friday. The judge is going to give a ruling today at 2:00 P.M., and we're pretty confident that he'll rule that there would be a stay on the IAA's ability to limit costs next year while pending an appeal to Europe.

All of our legal advice, and it's pretty black and white, is that the Dublin Airport traffic cap is contrary to EU law, and I think it would be scrapped by the EU courts. I don't know whether you want to add to that, Eddie, and maybe Julius come in on the Dublin cap.

Eddie Wilson (Ryanair DAC CEO)

Yeah. Michael, I think you covered most of the geographies there, except that I would say that post-COVID, we would have probably expected airports in terms of traffic recovery to move earlier. But now that it has started in places like Italy, where you have taxes coming out, or you look at just one example of Sweden, whereby SAS are much smaller than they were post-COVID or pre-COVID, Norwegian largely back in Norway, what does Sweden do for traffic? They figure it out. They lower the taxes. We put in 30% more based aircraft.

I think that's really going to start to play out across Europe, where when these airports now realize there's nobody else coming. So I think the cracks are beginning to come. And we see one other area where we've put in a lot of capacity as well as places like Morocco, where we've got 14 or 15 based aircraft down there and close to 10 million passengers. So I think there's lots more I think there's lots more to come, but I think you've covered off all the geographies there, Michael.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

I think one of the points I'd make is we're looking at the U.K. market next year. We expect to take our traffic down from about 55 million to about 50 million passengers. We're not going to close routes.

What we're going to do is we have enormous capacity in the UK, but we're going to trim out frequencies. And I think you're going to see us across a lot of our bigger markets trim frequencies next year, switch that capacity to those countries who are scrapping aviation taxes or lowering access costs and airports who are incentivizing growth. And I think, again, I will be one of the reasons I'm optimistic on pricing next year, apart from the fact that we'll have a pretty weak prior year comp, is that we will be constraining frequencies. We will not be closing routes. We will not create vacuums that I don't think we've any competitors in Europe anyway, but we're certainly not going to be inviting anybody else into markets where we are currently operating.

But trimming capacity on a lot of markets out of Ireland because of the traffic cap and in the UK because of this insane rise in APD, I think will be very good for our pricing next year. And again, if you come back to Neil Sorahan's point, if you look at the cost discipline in this business, the cost discipline is unmatched by any other European airline. If we get any bump in pricing next year, you're going to see an awful lot of that flow straight to the bottom line. Julius, you want to give us anything on the Dublin cap?

Juliusz Komorek (Group Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer and Company Secretary)

Thanks, Michael. Maybe just to say that it is accepted by all parties that there is a serious question of EU law to be answered in relation to the cap.

This is reflected by the fact that the court case on Friday was argued not only by Ryanair, but also by Aer Lingus and, importantly, an association of American airlines who are concerned about the risk of losing some of their slots in Dublin. So it's hard to be definitive and hard to predict the outcome of a court process, but we are fairly optimistic that the court will see sense in our arguments and grant the stay that we requested, which would result in growth being possible in Dublin next summer.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. Thanks, Julius. Thanks, Steven. Did you have a second?

Stephen Furlong (Senior Industry Analyst)

No, I'll leave it at that. Yeah. Thanks, Michael.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. Next question, please. Thanks, Steven.

Operator (participant)

.The next question comes from Jaime Rowbotham from Deutsche Bank. Jamie, your line is open. Please go ahead. Jamie. Hi there, Jamie. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Jamie, go ahead.

Okay. Let's move on.

Operator (participant)

We will move on for now. Let's come back. The next question comes from Muneeba Kayani from Bank of America. Muneeba, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Muneeba.

Muneeba Kayani (Senior Equity Analyst)

Good morning. It's Muneeba from Bank of America. So just wanted to follow up on the earlier question around OTAs. And you said that over 90% have been converted. What exactly does that mean? Are they all kind of the technology? Is it fully kind of integrated at this point? And then secondly, where are discussions with the two remaining ones? Do you think you would be able to get them on board as well? And then a question for Neil around cash return and buybacks. In the video, you mentioned that there could be more. How have you thought about the amounts for share buybacks, the 700 and the 800 that you've announced this year?

And kind of any framework for thinking of the amount into next year? Thank you.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Thanks, Muneeba. Maybe I'll take the first, and Neil will give you the second. So on the OTAs, if you take the range of OTAs who are making bookings on our system prior to last November, we've now signed up over 90% of them. There's essentially only two remaining OTAs who have not signed up to our deals, who are still overcharging or inflating our airfares and overcharging consumers. And that is Booking.com, but they're very small by volume in Europe. eDreams are bigger by volume in Europe, particularly in Spain. We have multiple court cases ongoing with both. We've won with Booking in the States in Delaware. We've won numerous cases against eDreams in Europe outside of Spain.

We have lost a couple of defamation actions in Spain, although generally, they've been ex parte defamation actions where we haven't been able to make our case, and we would be appealing those measures. I think it's inevitable that both Booking and eDreams will eventually sign up to our approved OTA agreements because I think it is very difficult using the transparency of the web to be able to be overcharging your customers while your competitor OTAs are selling them directly Ryanair's low fares with no kind of hidden charges or no inflation. But I think the critical thing is, so far, we've protected over 90% of our OTA customers, and we expect that figure will rise towards 100%. Over what period of time? I don't really know. I think there's much better on the OTAs on that, unless Jason or Eddie, you want to come in on it?

And then Neil, you answer the second question.

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

Yeah. Sorry, Michael. Like I said there, what you have is that without naming the specific ones, those that are more tech-focused companies are much better at maximizing the APIs that we've put into them already because they've got the tech resources on the other side, and some aren't. And they're still coming up to speed, particularly because as part of the OTA agreements, they can't put on extra charges on things like ancillaries. So they've got to be doubly sure that they are reflecting the transparency in pricing. So there's some way to go on some of them while they maximize it.

But those that are selling out summer holidays for next year in terms of packages, where it's a little bit more complex on their side, where they've got to put hotels and all that as part of it, they're generally getting back up to where they would have been. So they're at different paces, but I'm not going to give you color on how many what ones are behind the curve. It's just about their tech resources on the other side.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. And just for a hand-out on the share buybacks point, Muneeba, I would draw your attention to two things. One, the Boeing delivery delays this year meant we had with less CapEx, more spare cash. Our first instinct was to return that additional cash to those that spare cash to shareholders.

I would highlight, however, as we've done in the results, we have two large bond repayments coming up in September 2025, €850 million, and May 2026, €1.2 billion. We are determined to pay down that debt, and that will be the board's first priority while maintaining our dividend policy going fo

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

rward. Neil, on that share buyback? Yeah. I think you kind of read it. Your head is where I was going to go. I mean, the quantum this year was driven by the slower CapEx, but also we didn't have any big bond repayments. We got an opportunity, just given where the share price went in the first quarter sorry, in the July-August period, to lean into the €700 million buyback. We finished that earlier than anticipated, and €800 million with the slowing CapEx and the delays in Boeing seemed about the right number.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

That gets us out to next summer, but we're very focused that we do have that €850 million bond in September 2025. We've got €1.2 billion bonds. Beyond that, we'll continue to pay back 25% of prior year PAT, and you're seeing that we've already announced about a €240 million dividend in February. There'll be another €240 million or thereabouts in September of next year. But ultimately, the profitability in the business, the CapEx opportunities, the debt repayments will dictate how much spare cash is available for the boards to return. But I think the key is let's finish the €800 million buyback first, and then we'll look at what comes after that, Muneeba.

Muneeba Kayani (Senior Equity Analyst)

Thank you.

Alex Irving (Senior Equity Research Analyst of European Transport)

Thanks, Neil. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Dudley Shanley from Goodbody. Dudley, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Dudley Shanley (Head of Research)

Thank you very much. And morning.

I have two questions, if I may. First of all, can you just update us on the latest you've heard on the certification of the MAX 7 and then the follow-on certification of the MAX 10? And then the second question is one of your favorite topics, Michael, which is ATC disruption. It was particularly bad during the summer, especially for the first wave. Can anything be done about this and can it be done without route charges going up over time? Thank you.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Great. Okay. Latest, I was speaking to Stephanie Pope on Friday afternoon. They remain confident that they're still working away on the certification. They still expect certification of the MAX 7 in the first half of FY25, and then that the MAX 10 certification will follow reasonably quickly thereafter in about sometime in the mid- to second half of 2025.

I think we should take them at their word. We've had some reasonably positive feedback with EASA, who have said that they're reasonably impressed by the MAX 10 and don't see any reason why that certification won't take place. It's a good aircraft, but it's driven by getting the MAX 7 certified first. I think what's important, though, is that work continues even while the strike is ongoing. The ATC disruptions have been in shambles this year. I think what's really depressing about ATC is so much of this is fixable. Much of the Eurocontrol own figures show that flights in Europe this summer were at 98% of their pre-COVID volumes. So it's not that the skies are black or they're dealing with huge growth. They're actually dealing with fewer flights than they had in 2019. But they're short-staffed.

And in many cases, they're short-staffed because people simply won't come to work on Saturdays and Sundays. Or as in the case of the French, they've done this mad deal with the French unions where they can report to work three hours late. Now, if you're an accountant, reporting to work three hours late doesn't make that much difference. But if you're a pilot or you're an air traffic controller and you're due on at 4:00 A.M. in the morning and you report at 7:00 A.M. in the morning because you can, then the whole first wave gets delayed. So there are two things that can be done, and we're pushing hard with the EU Commission. One, protect overflights during national ATC strikes. The Spanish, the Italians, and the Greeks already do this. They use minimum service to protect 100% of overflights.

But the French use minimum service legislation to protect about 80% of their domestic flights and only 20% of overflights. And because of the geographical position of France, everybody else gets screwed. So two simple measures would be one, protect overflights during national ATC strikes. And two, we require a commitment that each of the ANSPs, particularly the French, the Germans, and to a lesser extent, the Spanish, will be fully staffed for the first wave of flights every morning. There is no point in having a labor deal that allows some air traffic controller and we're talking one or two air traffic controllers short on the first wave of flights in France could take about 20% of its capacity out. We're talking tiny numbers of people here, but that are being grossly mismanaged. And I think if the new EU Commission, I think we're optimistic.

Ursula von der Leyen has put competitiveness at the center of the new five-year mandate for the EU Commission. If you really want to do something about competitiveness, start with fixing Europe's chronic ATC services. Those two simple measures would eliminate about 90% of ATC delays. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Alex Irving from Bernstein. Alex, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Alex, hi.

Alex Irving (Senior Equity Research Analyst of European Transport)

Hi. Good morning, gentlemen. A couple from me, please. First of all, follow up on the MAX 10. You know what you say about the message from Boeing, but what are you crewing for? Is there a risk of unit staff cost inflation if this gets pushed out? Second, on ancillary sales per passenger, notice that growth has been pretty low in this quarter and the last quarter.

What's driving this, and what initiatives are you currently working on to get these back to growth, please?

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Sorry, could you just repeat the second half? You broke up there. pax something in the second quarter?

Alex Irving (Senior Equity Research Analyst of European Transport)

Ancillary sales per passenger. It's been low growth the last two quarters. What are we working on to get that back to growth?

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. I'll give that to the second one to Neil. MAX 10, look, we're very optimistic about the MAX 10. So I wouldn't change one decimal point of our growth trajectory to 300 million by the mid-2030s. The big issue for us is we do our first 17 deliveries of MAX 10s in this first half of 2027. So we have them there for summer 2027.

As long as the MAX 10 are certified in the second half of 2025 and Boeing can increase their monthly production in line with their projections, then there should be no delays to those deliveries. Those aircraft will bring us compared to the original, our 737NGs, we're getting 20% more seats, burning 20% less fuel. I mean, they're transformational for our operating costs. We don't foresee any significant staff impact. It will make our if you go back to slide three of our presentation, or slide four of our presentation for unit cost line, it will meaningfully widen our staff cost leadership, airport and handling cost leadership, everything with the sole exception of route charges, the aircraft are heavier, and our fuel leadership over every other airline in Europe.

We will not obviously recruit additional pilots if there's some additional delay to those deliveries in the first half of 2027, but I think you've seen us which did happen to us in the summer of 2024. So I don't see any significant bump in staff costs arising from we will have a fifth cabin crew on board, but all of our pay deals at the moment with pilots, cabin crew are done, whether you're they factor all variants of the 737s. We will only be taking 17 aircraft in. So if somebody was silly enough to say, "Well, we won't fly the MAX 10 unless we get XYZ," we'd say, "Fine." We'd simply move it to a different geography where we'd have no difficulty getting our crew in the MAX 10. So I think there's nothing but upside for us in the MAX 10.

The productivity of the aircraft are extraordinary. The productivity, by the way, even at the end of the game changers, have been extraordinary. We are getting 4% more seats. They are burning 16% less fuel. These are transformational in our business. We own the aircraft. And I look across at some of our competitors who are frantically doing sale and lease backs, desperately cooking the books, trying to take fucking profits from sale and lease backs through the P&L. We have none of that. And we have no long-term debt or leasing costs on our balance sheet. So I can't wait for the MAX 10s. I think they are going to be transformational for our costs and for our profitability from summer of 2027 onwards. And I'm not quite sure that on the ancillary sales, ancillary sales were up 10%. Traffic is up 9%.

So we are getting, as we said, ancillaries continue to bump a little bit ahead of traffic growth. But then, Neil, and maybe I don't know whether, Eddie, you want to add something on ancillaries there?

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

Yeah. I'm happy to do that, Michael. As you said, it was a pretty good performance in the first half of the year with the 10% increase in revenue. There's probably three big areas, Alex, as you're well aware, where we make a lot of the money, the reserve seating. That's going well. It's up year on year. And then we'd hope that there's more we can do on optimizing that and the pricing around it. Onboard sales have improved year on year.

Our new order-to-seat initiative, which we were trialing in the early summer and have now rolled out across the network, is going very, very well with people keen to get their order in early onboard. I'd be hopeful more to come from that. The one area that probably disappointed me a little bit this year was the priority boarding. I think some of that might have been down to the fact that we've been under pressure with air traffic control this year to try and not take on slots. Our priority is to close the door, get people onto the aircraft, and fly. There's maybe been a little bit of gaming from some of the customers on not taking the bags on board. We're addressing that. We're working through it. There's some upside there. I feel there's a bit more to go on the priority.

We've been quite clear. There's not going to be any major new initiatives coming, but there's lots to be done with the products that we have, just enhancing them and pleased with what's happening on board. Having underperformed for the past couple of years, onboard sales have turned the corner this year. And I think with order-to-seat, plenty more to go on that front and then working with Labs, we'll continue to try and work on improving the seating. And working with my colleagues in the operations and in the airports, we will work on improving the priority boarding.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

All right. Thank you. Okay. Anybody else want to come in on ancillaries?

Eddie Wilson (Ryanair DAC CEO)

No. I mean, just sorry, it's Eddie here.

It's really just down to the interplay or whatever between those core products in terms of optimizing revenue between the trade-offs between behaviors on bags and priority boarding and bundles and issues like that. And we'll never get to the end of it, Alex, with the Labs seen as the models get even more as the models will get more sophisticated in time.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

And I'll go back to that. One thought there. In a past year where the average fares or the average fare was down 10% per passenger, a lot of that is due to consumer spending being under pressure. I think it's very impressive that ancillary revenues were up 10% on a 9% traffic growth.

We are still able to mine the ancillary revenue line and to encourage or convert customers to the convenience of priority boarding, reserve seating, etc., even in a period of time when consumer spending is clearly under pressure. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Jarrod Castle from UBS. Jarrod, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Jarrod, hi.

Jarrod Castle (Research analyst)

Hi. Morning, everyone. You hedged 75% of your fuel for 2026. And if I look back a year ago, you'd only hedged 53% at that stage for March 2025. So why have you, I guess, increased the hedging? Is this suggesting anything in terms of the direction you see oil going to in the next year? And then also, you've kind of highlighted a lot about ownership versus control rules and your engagement with stakeholders.

I'm not asking kind of where this heads, but can you kind of just give a bit of color in terms of potential outcomes that you'd like to achieve? Thanks.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. I'll ask maybe Julius said, you do the ownership and control. Especially on hedging, Jarrod. Look, we're always there waiting to pound through. We see weakness in oil prices below our current year where we can lock away a cost saving. I think we're always keen to do so. We're undoubtedly in a period where the world is more volatile. Fuel prices, a week ago, were under $70 a barrel. Today, they've opened up over $75 a barrel. So what we're trying to do is to have some cost certainty going forward. We're hedged this year at $79 a barrel. We're now 75% hedged at $77 a barrel.

I don't think we would go over a medium-term higher than that. I think there's a real risk that, and some of the market analysts are beginning to talk now about maybe $60 a barrel. We could find ourselves a bit exposed compared to our own hedged competitors. Oil price could go lower, but then we'll pick that up at our 20%-25% unhedged fuel. But I like the feel of where we are at the moment. I think given the situation in the Middle East and in Ukraine, as we move into the winter, there is always a risk that oil prices will go higher, $75-$80 a barrel. We're not trying to beat the market. We know fucking nothing more than anybody else does about oil prices. But we have a balance sheet that allows us to hedge out, to buy forward jet fuel.

We are always. If you go back two years, we were hedged at $89 a barrel. This year, it's $79 a barrel. Next year, we're at $77 a barrel. If I saw an opportunity there, say if oil prices fell below $60 a barrel and we could meaningfully go in and hedge another 10%-15% and bring it down towards low 70s per barrel, we might move. But I think it's unlikely. We're still burned or scarred by the memory of COVID, where we did the COVID 90. We used to have a rolling 90% hedge policy. I don't think we'll ever again hedge up to 90% unless there's some ridiculous opportunity there. But I like the fact that we have very stable unit costs. We're taking more Gamechangers. That gives us an operating cost kind of efficiency.

We've hedged 75% of our fuel this year at $2 a barrel less than the current year. So I like what we're able to do to secure our kind of stable costs next year. I think, given weak prior year comps, there's a reasonable risk to the upside in terms of pricing, particularly with even our own capacity constraint next year. Julius, maybe you'd talk to give people a quick briefing on the O&C consultations and where we think it might go.

Juliusz Komorek (Group Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer and Company Secretary)

Yeah. Thanks, Michael. So over the last few weeks, we spoke to shareholders who represent approximately 60% of the issued share capital. Those shareholders currently hold both through the ordinaries and through the ADRs. We received a lot of interesting feedback and generally found this exercise very useful. We still have quite a few meetings in the diary for the coming weeks.

At the same time, we are in discussions with our regulators. That's the national regulators in Ireland, Poland, and Malta, and also the European Commission. I wouldn't want to talk more about potential outcomes, and I don't think it would be appropriate to give more color given that we haven't yet spoken to everyone. We have an open invitation out on our website for shareholders to express those views, and we have received interesting feedback through that channel also. I don't think it would be appropriate to those that we haven't spoken to yet to now go and give more color. It has been useful, and we will give an update as soon as we can.

Jarrod Castle (Research analyst)

Okay. Thanks for that.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

I think there's an important point to be made here, Jarrod. There was some concern at the start of this, particularly with the ADR holders.

The ordinaries were trading at a discount of 29% to the ADRs when we started this consultation on the 11th of September. Over the past six or eight weeks, that ordinary discount has narrowed down. As of last Friday, it was at 18%, the discount on the ordinaries compared to the ADRs. That narrowing has been entirely due to the prices of the ordinaries rising by 11% over that seven-week period. In fact, the price of the ADR has increased by 1%. So I think there was a fear among ADR holders that if we move here, this would that what they see as a premium on the ADRs, what we interpreted as an unfair discount on the ordinaries, would be arbitraged away by the ADR price falling.

In fact, as it has been borne out over the last six or seven weeks, we think what will happen is that the discount on the ordinaries will arbitrage away as the ordinaries will rise up to where the ADRs are. Right, and I think that's a key point, but yeah, as Julius has said, we have an open mind on this. The board will consider it, and the alternatives are we could remove the ownership and control restrictions. We could remove just the ownership restrictions but keep the voting control restrictions, or we could keep the ownership restrictions and remove the voting restrictions, and not alone, the board will take account of the views and the inputs of shareholders, but we also have to then liaise with our regulators as well, the European and national regulators of the five airlines that we presently own.

And we think that process is there a timeframe? Probably mid-next year before we come to some kind of conclusion. I think is that a reasonable timeframe? That's the best estimate at the moment, but no fixed timeframe.

Jarrod Castle (Research analyst)

Okay. Thanks, Julius.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Thanks, Jarrod. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Sathish Sivakumar from Citi. Sathish, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Sathish Sivakumar (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks, Michael. I got two questions. I got two questions here. First, on the ancillaries, on the video, it had mentioned about 35% of the passengers are ordering directly via app. So in terms of the spend, how does it actually compare, say, consumers or customers ordering via app? Are they tend to spend more versus the traditional onboard spend? Any comparison on that? What does the spend per pax look like?

And then the second one is around the fuel cost as we go into next year when the SAF mandate kicks in. Do you have any visibility around how much of the SAF procurement is done at what price? So that, again, it gives us good visibility in terms of fuel cost into the next few years. Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks, Sathish. On the order-to-seat, what we're seeing is a greater propensity. Now, it's reasonably recent, but there's an increased propensity of people making the orders while they're sitting there waiting for the aircraft to board. I think it will boost the spend per pax on in-flight sales. But in-flight sales are a pretty small part of our total ancillary volume. As Eddie has said, the large volume, the large moving items are the priority boarding, reserve seating.

But we think, and it's certainly borne out in the first couple of weeks of trials, there is a notable double-digit increase in the percentage of people who will shop on board when they can do so using do it in advance using the order-to-seat functionality. And we think that will continue. And I'm here with Thomas Fowler, our director of fuel sustainability. Thomas, do you want to take the second part? And then I might double back and ask Eddie or Neil to comment further on the order-to-seat.

Thomas Fowler (Director Of Sustainability and Finance)

Yeah. So Sathish, just on the SAF side, we're currently negotiating the prices with our fuel suppliers ahead of the mandate next year. So it's very early to give an exact number on it, but we have some contracts rolling off with suppliers in January that we're negotiating at the moment.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

And we're looking at somewhere premium SAF premiums of between two and four times depending on the region. But we're nowhere near finalized on it yet.

Thanks, Thomas. And Eddie, Neil, you want to add anything on the order-to-seat ancillary spend?

Eddie Wilson (Ryanair DAC CEO)

I mean, as you say, it's just started. Just two points I'd make is that one is from a Labs perspective. Here's a low-cost solution done via Bluetooth that has changed behaviors on board and just shows the innovation that we're getting from the Labs side without any servers on the back of the airplane or any certification or anything like that. So it's a pretty slick solution. And then the second thing I'd say, and I'm here with Sinead, and you get this anecdotally back from the crew that people are more inclined to buy more when they're ordering on the app rather than asking directly.

So, sometimes people don't ask for three paxets of Pringles or four cans of Heineken, but have no difficulty doing that when they're doing it through the app. So, it's a behavioral change. And so it looks like people actually will need more data on it, but it does look like they actually buy more per passenger.

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

Yeah. I'd agree with Eddie there. I think one of the other benefits it has is that people who may have traditionally waited for the second service or the third service are now willing to put in that random order between service, and you're getting the incremental sales that you wouldn't have got before bundles and stuff like that performing well also.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Yeah. I'll give you an anecdote of when I came back with the kids from Rome, the school midterm last week. My wife now has me ordering the stuff too.

She's paranoid that we won't have a panini or a ham and cheese or something on board. So we now order through the app. The only downside is I was sitting in row four. People around me say they arrived with my stuff first. So I say, "You get special service here on the inside." He said, "No, no. It's the order to the system. You can join in too." I think it will significantly boost the conversion of people on board, but it won't be dramatic. Its impact on our overall ancillary revenues won't be dramatic because inflight sales is a reasonably small percentage of that. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Savanthi Syth from Raymond James. Savanthi, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Savanthi Syth (Managing Director of Airlines/Advanced Air Mobility)

Hey, good morning. Hey. Just a few quick questions.

If you look at the next 12 to 18 months, just given your slower growth plan, are there any kind of major cost items that you think from current trends you'll see kind of greater pressure or maybe because some of the items that you're working on that might see less pressure than you're seeing today? And then just on the second question, could you talk about the steps that you need to take to migrate that last 25% of customers to kind of the app? And are there any kind of related cost savings that you're expecting?

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay, Eddie, I'll ask you to do the second half. I'll do the first half.

The next 12 to 18 months on cost items, I mean, I think the two that we would focus on at the moment is the propensity of governments like the French and the UK to look for increased taxes on air travel. I think we've seen very significant successes in getting the Irish, the Hungarians, the Swedes, the Italian regions to roll back taxes. But there's no doubt in my mind that the UK and French are going in the opposite direction. I would worry about route charges, although I think while we think there's some reasonably simple solutions here on route charges, like protecting overflights and making sure that they all show up to work first thing in the morning, I think it would be used by governments as a way of trying to drive up ANSPs to drive up route fee or ATC fees by above inflation.

Other than that, we think airports and handling, labor, aircraft and ownership, and our financing income line will continue to be strong. But I think I draw enough of a comfort from our cost performance in the first half of this year and over the full part of this year. No other airline in Europe is going out there this year with kind of cost flat unless they're kind of scamming the P&L by recognizing loss of sale and lease back profits through the P&L. I think the real upside for us in the next 12-18 months, with our capacity constrained and revenue or frequency reductions in a lot of the bigger markets, is I think there's a real potential to the upside on pricing and fares.

I begin to hope we're beginning to see that as we move into Q3, where there's no doubt in my mind we're seeing strong bookings. The price declines are moderating. A lot depends on what happens in summer 2025. But I would be reasonably optimistic that, and again, against prior year weak comparables, we'll see fares up in summer 2025. Eddie, do you want to talk about migrating the other 25% of customers to the app?

Eddie Wilson (Ryanair DAC CEO)

Yeah. I mean, the real benefits here, and we've seen this flowing through from the app and the day-of-travel app, where we're actually able to communicate what gates you're going to, any delays that might be coming. And we're able to manage that much, much better. And the next phase of this will be on the app. You'll be able to manage operational problems more easily on the day.

So, for example, if you're downgrading an aircraft from an 8200 to an 800 and there's a different seat configuration, you'll be able to virtually do that in real time without people having to talk about which seats they're in. And all those things that will drive operational efficiency and 25-minute turnarounds. And there's also the ability, when you've got everybody on this app, to get around those old legacy systems that are at airports, which have been around since old God's time, Caesar systems, etc. You'll be able to manage queues of virtual boarding areas, etc. So that will speed up anything that speeds up getting people on aircraft, turning around on time, particularly as more larger gauge aircraft come online. We've got to be thinking about that as well.

Ultimately, okay, it saves paper, but there'll be ultimately a cost benefit for us in getting around legacy systems, and it'll be a much better experience, and it'll be in place for next summer, and you'll need a smartphone to do that, and 70% of people do it. We did this before with online check-in, and people didn't have to go to check-in desks. It's another change, but I think people see the benefit of it.

Savanthi Syth (Managing Director of Airlines/Advanced Air Mobility)

Thank you.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

I mean, I'm very optimistic. I think we can't guarantee or eliminate 100% of things like boarding card reissue fees, airport check-in fees, but really, if we have everybody on the app and we're sending you messages, it should really collapse those fees, which really are a source of irritation to a small number of passengers.

Increasingly, the vast majority of our passengers who arrive at airports without having checked in are customers of OTAs who weren't passed on the reminder emails or the text SMSs went to some fake mobile phone number. When if we have 100% of people on the app, you'll be getting the reminders. I think everybody then you'll be able to check in there on your phone the day before you travel. We should really be able to eliminate 100%. Now, there'll always be some moron who will ignore the messages, think it's spam, and won't check in. If they still arrive at the airport and haven't checked in, they will be hit with a fee. We think we should be able to collapse that to almost zero once we have everybody on the app.

So there'll be a real boost, I think, in our interaction with customers, but also eliminating some of those annoying fees for customers, some of which they only pay because OTAs didn't pass them on our kind of reminder emails and text SMSs. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Duane Pfennigwerth from Evercore ISI. Duane, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Duane Pfennigwerth (Senior Managing Director of Equities)

Hey. Good morning. Thanks for going into overtime here. Just on overstaffing, have you paused pilot hiring? And maybe you could put into context the number of pilots you plan to hire in the next year versus what you've done the last couple of years. And then really, the point of the question is, do you have an estimate for the size of the cost headwind from overstaffing, which presumably should work itself out over the next year or two?

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

I think so.

I mean, I wouldn't want to put a particular number on it, Duane, but we had geared up. We were crewed for we had trained up, and we recruit and train pilots in the first calendar, first two calendar quarters. So we had hired more than 20 more pilots and cabin crew for 20 more aircraft than we actually operated through the summer of 2025. Now, we could have taken the decision right there, make them redundant, get rid of them. We won't. We did think natural attrition would take them out. The problem actually at the moment is we have very little attrition of pilots and cabin crew. We're at all-time record low turnover of pilots and cabin crew. So we did carry them through the summer. I think it did minimize some EU261 compensation costs because we did have more standby pilots and standby cabin crew.

But we wouldn't want to do it again. I think that's why we're telegraphing now to the market early. We're taking down the growth next year. We're saying today 210 million. If Boeing come back with adverse news between now and Christmas once the strike is over, I mean, Stephanie Pope has committed to me. She'll come back to me once they are out of the strike and have people back to work. She'll give me a definitive delivery on our nine Q4 delayed deliveries and then how many of the 29 aircraft, the last 29 aircraft we're going to get in advance of. And when I say summer 2025, I said, "Stephanie, I'm only taking aircraft up to the end of June. I'm not counting any in July and August." This year, we were trying to take deliveries in July, trying to take deliveries in August.

We had crews ready to go, and we had them on sale, and we had to chop and chase the schedules. It was very disruptive and costly, but because of the lack of attrition at the moment, we have stepped down or canceled a lot of pilot recruitment and training, pilot recruitment and cabin crew recruitment and training, both in the calendar fourth quarter and in the calendar first quarter next year. We are doing some modest pilot recruitment, but it's very modest. Almost all of it will be absorbed by our cadet programs, recruiting our cadets as second officer, promoting them through to first officers. There's very few people leaving at the moment. There's not a lot of other 737 jobs across Europe. There's very little demand in the Middle East for 737 pilots.

And so I think our turnover attrition of pilots is at an all-time low, which is good. I think people are generally happy with where they are. They're getting the benefit of significant pay increase and productivity pay increases over the last two years. And people seem to be generally happy with life, and nobody's leaving. Cabin crew, same situation. But again, because the recruitment and training of cabin crew is a much shorter cycle. But we have canceled a lot of recruitment and training programs that we had planned in Q3, in Q4, and calendar Q1 of next year. We will do some cabin crew recruitment and training in the first half of next year, but probably only running at about 30% or 40% of what we would have normally done in previous years when attrition was higher.

But I think we had a meaningful cost penalty this year. If you look at over the full year, we expect the kind of the staff costs going to rise, traffic up about 9%. Staff costs will rise between high teens. Some of that, a couple of percentage points, that is because we were overcrewed through the summer with those pilots and cabin crew for the 20 aircraft, which we didn't get. And that hits us on the double. We're down 5 million passengers. We don't have the—we've lost that 5 million passengers. We've lost the ancillary revenue of those 5 million passengers, but we carried the crews through the summers at the same time. Neil, you want to add anything on that?

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

No, I think you've covered it very well. The 20 aircraft worth of overcrewing was the key lag for us this year.

And hopefully, we can manage that down a bit into next year. If we're growing for less aircraft in the fleet, we'll accrue appropriately.

Duane Pfennigwerth (Senior Managing Director of Equities)

Yeah. Thank you.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Thanks, Duane. Okay, next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Ruairi Cullinane from RBC. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Ruairi Cullinane (Transport Equity Research Analyst)

Ruairi, hi. Sorry. Yes, good morning. Firstly, on slide 17 of your presentation, you've now got 10% passenger growth in full year 2027 on 1% fleet growth. So how should we think about that? And then secondly, I was wondering if in Q3 your book-to-date pricing was much different from your fare expectations given the slightly weird prior year comp you've got from OTAs removing Ryanair flights from their websites last November. Thank you.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Thanks, Ruairi. I mean, I can't remember off the top of my head what's on slide there.

What traffic number have we in for FY27 there? Are you looking at it?

Ruairi Cullinane (Transport Equity Research Analyst)

Oh, hang on. If we put 230 in there, which is a point in time, it may or may not be that number depending on the number of aircraft we get.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

I think that's reasonable. We would expect for FY27. I mean, a lot of this now would be dependent on getting if Boeing delivers all of the 20. I mean, I've got an assurance from Stephanie Pope on Friday that while they may miss some of the deliveries for summer 2025, we will have all of the remaining Gamechangers, the 210 Gamechangers in the system for summer 2026. I think it would be reasonable that we would get close to 230 million. We are determined to continue to hit those traffic numbers, but they're dependent on Boeing delivery delays.

So if you take our FY25, originally we were 200 million. I think we'd be at about 199 and change. FY26 was originally 215. We would step that back now towards about 210. But I see no reason why we wouldn't then be able to get that back up towards 230 million for FY27. Now, maybe it might be 225, 227, 228. But we will, as soon as we get those aircraft, we can deploy them profitably. And so I think that's reasonable. We then will have a year or two. I'm not sure about FY28 or FY29 because we will, at that point in time, be facing redelivering some of the older A320s, and we're heavily dependent on Boeing not having any delivery delays on the first of the MAX 10s. On Q3 and the OTAs, look, it's hard to separate it.

I mean, all we can give you is what we have at the moment. That is that the forward bookings into Q3 are strong. We released the October traffic stats this morning, 94% load factor, traffic up 7%. And that was even with the Boeing delivery delays. It's hard to, again, say how much of that is due to the OTAs coming back online. Eddie has made the point. While we have approved delayed deals in place with over 90% of the OTAs, some of them have not yet got the pipes or the API pipe fully functional because their IT departments are slower than some of the bigger ones who are better at the IT. And so I think there's more to come from the OTAs in Q3 and Q4. But what we can tell you at this point in time is traffic growth is strong.

We would still expect in Q3 that the scheduled traffic in Q3 to be up some 7-8% in line with the October number, and the price decline is certainly moderating. I go back again: minus 15% in Q1. Some of that was the Easter moving into Q4: minus 7% in Q2. I think a midpoint between 0% and minus 5% in Q3 would be a reasonable back of the envelope. It's not a forecast. Please don't quote it back to me as some bloody forecast, but it is moderating. Then it's just hard to know how much Easter will affect Q4, but while we have a tough prior year comp in Q4, we will have a bumper Q1 because we'll have all of Easter in next year's Q1, whereas we only have half Easter in this year's Q1. Thanks, Rory. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Andrew Lobbenberg from Barclays. Andrew, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Lobbenberg (European Equity Research Sector Head Transport)

Hello. Hi. You cut in capacity to the UK, you say, by 10%. What are you going to do with those slots? And then a second question back to OTAs. Are you bored of it yet? You say 90% of the OTAs are signed up, but eDreams is kind of large, I think. So would it be fair to say that that represented more than 10% of your passengers back from last year? So actually, you're missing a bit more than the 10% you suggest there. And what is the pathway forward for you to kiss and make up with eDreams?

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. Thanks, Andrew.

A lot of the, as I say, we try to make the point that a lot of the airports in the UK, if we cut about five million passengers out of the UK next year, it will be done on frequency. We won't move aircraft. We won't vacate overnight aircraft in place. Now, most of our UK airports are not slot restricted, but we certainly wouldn't reduce overnight aircraft at the big airports, Stansted, Manchester, Bristol. I'm trying to think, Eddie, off the top of my head, if there's any others that are slot controlled. I don't think so. Edinburgh, Glasgow, all the rest of you right. But we will take kind of a lot of the capacity we operate at those airports is on aircraft that are based elsewhere in Ireland or in Europe, flying in and out of those airports.

We will divert some of those frequencies away from the UK to other lower-cost destinations like Italy, regional Italy, Sweden, Central Eastern Europe, where we're seeing incentives are increasing incentives. So we don't think, and we wouldn't compromise slots at any of the couple of UK airports where slots for us are an issue. On the OTAs, eDreams is one of the bigger ones, but it's nowhere near 10% of passengers. None of the OTAs on their own have a significant impact on our volumes. They're all reasonably modest on a standalone basis. If you look at the eDreams business model, however, almost, well, in fact, 100% of what they claim to be profitability is coming from this eDreams Prime subscription where they promise you a discount on 100% of flights. And yet, on every flight we've tried, they're overcharging customers.

We think it's inevitable that eDreams will ultimately have to sign up because I think they're going to cede market share to other competitors like Loveholidays and the other OTAs who will simply take because the other OTAs can now offer low Ryanair fares at Ryanair's prices, whereas the OTA is still trying to run a business where they're inflating Ryanair fares and the cost of Ryanair ancillary services, and I think, given the transparency of the web, it's inevitable that they will have to sign up eventually. We're indifferent as to whether they do or they don't, but at the moment, we're off-sale with eDreams. That suits us fine. We don't want to be on-sale with anybody who is inflating our airfares or overcharging our customers, and it's a matter for eDreams. We, frankly, couldn't care less. It's not going to make any difference to us going forward.

But we are absolutely determined to ensure that nobody gets between us and our customers and that we, by working with approved OTAs, ensure that those OTAs are offering their customers real Ryanair fares, and we're getting real customer emails and real customer payment details. Anybody else want to add anything on the eDreams OTA side? Feel free. No? Okay. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Gerald Khoo from Panmure Liberum. Gerald, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Gerald Khoo (Equity Research of Transport)

Monday, I want to, if I can, firstly on the tax rates, which seemed a bit high at 14% in Q2. Obviously, I'll bump it by the standard rates. I was just wondering why that wasn't what would be a sensible assumption for a full year.

Secondly, on your revised aircraft delivery schedule, could you clarify what you've actually assumed in terms of timing of the resolution of the strike at Boeing, please?

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. Maybe Neil or maybe Tracey McCann might find out the tax rate, and then I'll take the Boeing delivery schedule.

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

Yeah, I'm happy to jump in there on the tax, Gerald. As you're probably aware, we make most of our profit in the first half of the year and in jurisdictions where tax rates are slightly higher, whereas we tend to make less money in the second half of the year. So you'll see the tax rate migrate down as losses come into some of the markets in H2. I think a reasonable assumption for the full year would be somewhere close to between 10% and 11% tax for the full year.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Thanks, Neil.

On the aircraft delivery schedule, we put there an updated aircraft delivery schedule, more showing so we can give you a sense of where we think we are in terms of the additional Boeing delivery delays and why that's causing us to step back our traffic forecast for FY25, but also for FY26. We've made no assumptions on the settlement of the strike. There is a ballot today on the 38% pay increase. We've no idea whether we get settled or not. Boeing themselves think it's about 50/50. I suspect the labor may well turn it down if they're at 38%. My view is these guys will hang out for 40%, but what do I know? I mean, all we're saying there is that's what our current forecast would be for FY26.

To get to 210 million passengers, we need to get the nine delayed Q4 aircraft in by the end of April or May. I'm saying we get those in the first quarter, and then the critical issue is how many of the 29 additional aircraft do we get by the end of June? We're not going to schedule any aircraft deliveries in July or August. So whatever we get by the end of June, at this point in time, I think 15 is a reasonable assumption, but that's heavily qualified. But once Boeing and, again, I talked to Stephanie Pope on Friday, they will update their kind of delivery schedules with us once the strike is finished, and they think that it will take about four weeks to get back into kind of full production after the strike.

We hope the strike gets resolved this week, in which case at least they're back up to full production before Thanksgiving and Christmas or after Thanksgiving, but before Christmas. But there is a real risk that we will get less than those 15 aircraft in time by the end of June. If it's 10, if it's five, I don't know what that impact will be. We will have to move some of our traffic growth out of FY26 and into FY27. But I would caution, again, the more we have to delay our growth, the better I think would be the outcome for pricing in summer 2025 and in FY26 with a weaker prior year comp in FY25.

Gerald Khoo (Equity Research of Transport)

Okay. Thanks very much.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Personally, I would like to take as many aircraft as we can get, but as a shareholder, I think the more the aircraft are delayed, the better it would be for our profitability in FY26. Thanks, Gerald. Next question, please.

Conor Dwyer (Research Analyst)

Our last question comes from Conor Dwyer from Morgan Stanley. Connor, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Conor, hi.

Conor Dwyer (Research Analyst)

Hi, guys. Good morning. First question is just on the buyback. You talked about the slowdown being influenced by the payback of the bond next year, lower CapEx this year accelerating it. But I'm wondering if there's any influence by the fact that you're also expecting potential rule changes on the ownership. And if basically it would make a bit more sense to hold back some of the cash to do more of the buyback on the ordinary.

The second question on the pre-recorded call, Neil, you spoke about a willingness to explore other financing options if they become more attractive than cash. Just wondering if that's only to really kind of change the capital structure or if you also might consider extra leasing to bump up the growth of the overall business over the next few years. Thanks very much.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

Okay. Thanks. I'll take the first again, Neil, to take the second. On the buybacks, I don't think the review of the ownership and control would have any difference. The buybacks are not driven by the pricing of the discount on the ordinaries or on the ADRs. I mean, the current buyback, we've skewed 70/30 towards the ADRs anyway. But I think it's instructive that since we've begun this consultation process with the shareholders, the discount on the ordinaries has eroded from 29% to 18%.

Almost all of that has come as a result of the cost of the pricing on the ordinaries rising, even at a time when we're buying more ADRs than ordinaries. So I don't think it'll make any significant difference. If the board were to change either the ownership or the control rules in conjunction with our regulators, we will still be facing, I think, the material challenge of very strong cash generation as long as we maintain kind of current profitability for the next two or three years while we have a gap or a falloff in CapEx. And what drives our share buybacks is surplus internally generated free cash flow. We have no other uses for that cash, and therefore, with evidence this year, we completed a €700 million share buyback.

Now, I think there was no doubt that the decline in the share price as a result of the disappointing guidance on our pricing and fares this summer certainly incentivized the board, I think, to move quickly and to accelerate the share buybacks. But it was driven by having surplus cash. I think the surplus cash will be a little tighter for the next year or two given the two big bond repayments, but there should still be room for share buybacks over those two years. And then we're back into significant CapEx as the MAX 10 deliveries start to roll out in the first half of 2027. So I don't think the board and the board's willingness to look at buybacks will be in any way affected by the consultation process on ownership and control.

It will be driven solely by our ability to continue to generate really strong free cash flow and deploying that free cash flow in terms of shareholder returns. I look around me at our competitors, all of whom have massive net debt positions, and yet we've returned nine billion to shareholders over the last 15 years. I think there's every indication through a combination of dividends and share buybacks that we'll be able to continue that market-leading performance for the next couple of years. Neil, I forgot the second half. I'm still doing the pre-record on.

Neil Sorahan (CFO)

There will be things, yeah, and financing options available to us. Conor, we've always been opportunistic in what we do. The reality is, in relation to leasing, we've got a higher investment-grade rating than any of the lessors out there. So we can raise money cheaper than the lessors.

They would have to have a compelling reason for why we would go towards that financing. I can't see with capacity constraint for some years that the lessors are going to reduce what are now sky-high leasing rates, which thankfully we're not paying, but our competitors are. But if the bond market, for example, was to become cheaper than financing ourselves out of cash to refinance bonds and stuff like that, we might look at it. Potentially, in a few years' time, when we're trying to take some of the residual risk from the NGs off the balance sheet, we might look at lessors. But I think if their pricing remains where it's at, that wouldn't be my first, second, or third port of call when it comes to looking at alternatives to our current cash.

Conor Dwyer (Research Analyst)

Very clear. Thanks very much, both.

Yeah.

Michael O'Leary (Group CEO)

And again, I think looking forward to next year, nothing fills me more full of optimism than the aircraft lessors making record profits on lease extensions and new aircraft leases to our competitor airlines. They're driving up the cost of operations of our competitors across Europe at a time when we're buying new aircraft using our balance sheet, and those aircraft are carrying 4% more passengers but burning 16% less fuel. And when we get to the MAX 10s, 20% more passengers at 20% less fuel. So I'm very optimistic going forward that the unit cost gap between us and our competitors will continue to widen, and our competition in Europe are going to be under significant pressure. You look at Lufthansa's results last week, Air France this week, all talking about EBITDA because there isn't any earnings there.

These guys in a constrained capacity market are going to drive up airfares for the next couple of years. I think that will give us a lot of headroom to see modest growth in airfares, much of which will flow through to Ryanair's bottom line. Any other questions, or is that the end of it? Concludes the Q&A session. I'll hand back to you now. Okay. Thank you very much, everybody. I think we've run an hour and a half on questions, Q&A. We have an extensive roadshow in place. Me and a number of the team are over here in the US, and Neil is in the UK heading for the US. Eddie and there's other team members who will be covering investor meetings, Ireland in the UK and Europe. If anybody wants a meeting with us, please can you contact Davy, Goodbody, or Citi?

We'd be very happy to have a meeting with any investors. May I conclude by saying, look, I think we've had a fraught summer on pricing. We were surprised by the downturn in pricing after two years of very strong pricing. I think the real message, today's takeaway from this call, though, is look at the unit cost performance. The unit cost performance is absolutely bang on. We are doing a stellar job on containing costs. We've been surprised by the weakness in pricing this year, but I think it's reasonable to expect that pricing will move modestly upwards for the next summer or two in a heavily constrained marketplace as long as there's no geopolitical events that disrupt air travel.

And I would think the Ryanair balance sheet and certainly Ryanair's P&L is poised to benefit from any improvement in pricing or upturn in pricing next year, particularly as we will move into FY26 with a very weak prior year comp. And with that, Matt, thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you all at some stage over the next week. Oh, and Neil and Jason are going out to the Baird Industrial Conference in Chicago next week as well. So if we don't get you this week and anyone's had a meeting with Neil or Jason, they'll be in Chicago next week. Thanks, everybody. So I hope to see you soon. Thanks. Bye.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's call. Thank you very much for your attendance. You may now disconnect your lines.