“Air fares rose by 20 per cent between April and May 2023, with some of the highest rises for European flights.”
So said the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in June. But what goes up seems to be coming down fast.
For a snapshot of fares I looked at next Tuesday 10 October, and picked the 10 most appealing ultra-cheap fares I could find.
For less than the actual air passenger duty that an airline must pay when you step aboard a plane, you could next week fly to Nimes in southern France or Poznan in Poland. These, like half of the examples I found, are from London Stansted. But if you would like to swap the south coast of England to the Costa del Sol, you could get from Bournemouth to Malaga for £15. The same amount buys an Edinburgh to Shannon ticket, with Manchester to Billund – home of Legoland – only £17.
Even Ouarzazate in southern Morocco is well under £20 from Essex. A few spot checks suggest that flying each route in the reverse direction provides equally silly fares.
The full list is here, in ascending order of price:
- Stansted to Nimes £12
- Stansted to Poznan £12
- Liverpool to Beauvais £14
- Bournemouth to Malaga £15
- Edinburgh to Shannon £15
- Stansted to Pisa £16
- Manchester to Billund £17
- Stansted to Ouarzazate £17
- Stansted to Zagreb £18
- Leeds Bradford to Gdansk £18
The last of these is flown by Wizz Air. But as you have probably guessed, all the rest are with Ryanair.
The carrier has long specialised in selling at absurdly low fares; the lowest I have paid is £0.50 from Frankfurt Hahn to Stansted during a particularly bleak midwinter in the early 2000s.
The business premise is this: sell the average person a ticket at below cost, and there is a fair chance that “ancillary revenue” – from extra cabin baggage to seat selection to onboard lottery tickets – will nudge the purchase up until it exceeds the marginal cost of putting a person in a seat.
Once you board, the passenger in the next seat may well have paid more for their basic fare: either because they committed early in order to guarantee they were on the plane, or (more likely) because they booked very late on. That is not a given: looking to tomorrow, all three Ryanair flights from Stansted to Pisa are selling at under £18.
Still, after an exceptionally profitable summer the airline’s bosses are not unduly alarmed – not least because other carriers are enduring the same soft demand.
“We’ve seen a very strange market, as we’ve emerged out of Covid during summer ’22 and summer ’23,” chief executive Michael O’Leary told me.
“Capacity in Europe is still not back at its pre-Covid levels. We think this year it was running at about 92 per cent. So capacity hasn’t yet fully returned, but there’s very strong demand.
“In summer 2022, everybody wanted to go to the beaches of Europe. Summer 2023 was also artificially strong because of the huge inbound US volumes coming to Europe on the back of a very strong dollar and a weak euro. Asia also started to reopen this summer.”
The result: in both years, “double-digit traffic growth and double-digit fare growth” – as exemplified in the ONS report of a surge in fares by one-fifth in early summer 2023.
But, says the Ryanair CEO, the passenger will be rather more in control in 2024.
“I think next summer capacity will be back up at pre-Covid levels – say 100 per cent of pre-Covid capacity. I don’t think the US market will be as strong. I think the Asian market will be a little bit stronger.”
“We’ll still see probably 8 or 9 per cent traffic growth if Boeing can deliver all the aircraft.” The planemaker is experiencing a lot of problems in fulfilling its order book, a large part of which is for Ryanair’s bespoke variant of the Boeing 737 Max.
Yet if most of the new aircraft are available in time for the next summer peak, fares will level out.
“I would be hopeful next year, we’ll see fares rise in the summer somewhere between zero and 5 per cent. But I think it’ll be much more modest going forward.”
Meanwhile, if you are fortunate enough to be earning the new national minimum wage, 60 minutes will be enough to afford an autumn flight.
All fares researched in the evening of Tuesday 3 October for travel on Tuesday 10 October
