Norwegian tops Euro LCC growth rankings in July; easyJet beats Ryanair on load factor for sixth straight month

At 25.6% the fastest growth in July came from Norwegian. There are plenty of poor results by LCCs but Ryanair and easyJet still maintained their benchmark 20% improvements. (anna.aero does not apologise for using our fake image of the ‘Walesa’ Norwegian tail yet again.)

Among European LCCs reporting monthly traffic data Norwegian has reported the fastest growth in July, repeating a feat it managed in both February and April. Passenger numbers were up 25.6% compared with July 2007. This does not include data from its acquisition of flynordic. Norwegian’s international traffic peaks in July and this year made up just over 60% of the airline’s passenger numbers.

Source: Airline websites, UK CAA

Vueling (-12.6%), Air Berlin (-1.4%) and SkyEurope (-0.1%) all reported a year-on-year fall in passenger numbers in June while Germanwings only reported 0.3% growth. easyJet and Ryanair continued to report growth of around 20%.

Data from the UK CAA reveals that jet2.com’s passenger numbers are down over 30% since the start of the summer season. This is as a result of major network cutbacks at Manchester and Newcastle. This includes the axing of the Newcastle to London Gatwick service which is now operated by Flybe.

Source: Airline websites, AENA, UK CAA

All the tracked LCCs reported July load factors that were better than those achieved in June. For the six month in a row easyJet had the highest reported booked load factors of the carriers tracked. Vueling and clickair once again had the lowest load factors with clickair failing to reach 70% at its Barcelona base.

Compared with July 2007 SkyEurope’s load factor was down 7.5 points, Vueling’s was down 6.5 points, Norwegian’s was down 4.1 points and clickair’s was down 6.3 points. All of these airlines have been focussing on increasing revenues and so some of the really cheap seats used to stimulate traffic have been rather harder to find.