Airline and package holiday operator Jet2 says renewed consumer confidence has helped it achieve a dramatic upswing in revenues and profits.
The Leeds Bradford Airport-based firm published unaudited results for the year to the end of March in which it said revenue had been boosted 300% to £5.03bn and previous year operating losses of more than £320m had been turned around to operating profits of £394m. Investors were shown performance was also well ahead of its last pre-Covid numbers in 2020, with revenue 40% ahead of that year and operating profits 34% higher.
The results come after a turbulent time for the travel industry in which Jet2 founder and chairman Philip Meeson has been highly critical of airports' handling of the pandemic. He reiterated that a lack of planning and preparedness had hampered Jet2's return after the lifting of restrictions, but the latest profit figures come despite more than £50m of delay compensation costs stemming from last summer's airports chaos.
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Mr Meeson, who developed the business from a small cargo carrier in the 1980s, announced his intention to step down from the board, saying he was conscious of his age and wanted an orderly succession as a replacement is now sought. He paid tribute to Jet2 staff who all received bonuses of £1,000 on the back of the successful summer season in which passenger numbers significantly rebounded.
The airline said it had carried 16.22m people, up from 4.85m in 2022, with a higher proportion of those flyers being package holiday custo.mers. In recent years Jet2 has increasingly positioned itself as package provider through its Jet2holidays arm, which accounted for £4.02bn of revenue and where the average price of a trip increased 10% to £761.
Earlier this year the firm announced a new base at Liverpool John Lennon Airport, which it said would be operational from March 2024. It will be Jet2's 11th UK base serving 20 summer destinations, including the Canary Islands and Bulgaria.
In an update as part of the results, Mr Meeson said: "Looking forward, although we continue to believe that the end-to-end package holiday is a resilient and popular product, particularly during difficult economic times and our ability to offer truly variable duration holidays enables our customers to tailor their holiday plans to suit their individual budgets, we are cognisant of how quickly the macro-economic environment is evolving and how this may affect consumers' future spending.
"On that basis, and with the peak summer months of July, August and September not yet complete plus the majority of Winter 2023/2024 seat capacity still to sell, it remains premature as is always the case at this time of year, to provide definitive guidance as to group profitability for the financial year ending March 31, 2024."
