Jet2 chairman says customer bookings have remained "consistently strong"

In a statement released at the company's annual general meeting today, Philip Meeson, the executive chairman, said the leisure travel business continued to benefit from the significant investment made in preparation for the summer 2022 season.

This included retaining more than 8,000 staff and subsequently rewarding "our trusted and experienced team for their unrivalled customer service with early and meaningful salary increases".

Mr Meeson added: "It is this focus on the long term differentiation of the Jet2.com and Jet2holidays brands that has enabled our on sale seat capacity for the season to remain approximately 14% higher than summer 2019, with no cancellations made due to any Jet2 resource constraints.

He added: "Overall customer bookings, though a little later than normal, have remained consistently strong.

"Package holiday customers continue to display a materially higher mix of the total departing passengers being up 13ppts and average load factors are only 1.4ppts behind summer 2019 at the same point, despite the 14% increase in seat capacity, whilst pricing remains robust. Pleasingly, the difficult return to normal operations experienced in early summer 2022 due to the lack of planning and investment by many airports and associated suppliers, has abated significantly."

Mr Meeson said that winter 2022/23 forward bookings are satisfactory with average load factors matching those of winter 2019/20 at the same point, against a 2% seat capacity increase and with pricing currently robust.

He added: "With some way still to go in the leisure travel winter booking cycle, we are currently on track to achieve current market expectations for group profit before foreign exchange revaluations and taxation for the year ending 31 March 2023.

"We are very confident that, package holidays are the right product for price conscious customers especially in challenging economic times, and this provides further opportunity for us to grow our customer base, though as previously announced, margins may come under some pressure in the short term.

"Our well proven dynamic booking systems enable us to flex our offer to match consumers' changing demands and to deliver great value truly variable duration holidays. We also expect the growing package holidays mix to continue to benefit from our high trust ratings right across Which?, Trip Advisor, Trust Pilot and Skytrax.

"We have never compromised on customer service and nor shall we in the future. It is the founding principle of what we do and we were delighted to welcome Jet2.com's 100 millionth customer who travelled from Manchester Airport to Fuerteventura a week ago."