Ryanair has become the first European airline to carry 200 million passengers in a single calendar year.
The airline said the passenger was 84-year-old Maria Cornelia Vos, who flew from Fuerteventura to Madrid yesterday.
200 million passengers in one calendar year is a new record for Ryanair and it is one of the few airlines in the world to have achieved the milestone.
The other airlines include American Airlines, which flew 248.7 million in the calendar year of 2024, as well as Delta Air Lines, who flew 200 million in the same year.
Ryanair is expected to end the year with about two million more passengers than expected.
For next year, the latest figure given by the airline is 206 million. It had reduced the figure by four million due to the delay in deliveries from US plane manufacturer Boeing.
"We are working with Boeing to accelerate deliveries. Although B737 production is recovering from the Boeing strike at the end of 2024, we do not expect sufficient units to arrive by the summer of 2025," group chief executive Michael O'Leary said in January.
"We are confident of receiving the remaining 29 aircraft on our order by March 2026, which will allow us to make up the backlog in increased traffic in the summer of 2026, rather than 2025," he added.
Meanwhile, Ryanair expects ticket prices to rise by 4-6% this year, only partially recovering from the 8% decline last year, group CEO Michael O'Leary told Reuters today.
"We're operating on the basis this year that pricing will rise by between 4-6% and having fallen by 8% last year. So overall, pricing will be about 2% less than it was two years ago," he said.
Michael O'Leary also said Ryanair took about 10,000 extra bookings on flights in and out of London from points all over Europe during the temporary shutdown at London's Heathrow airport last Friday.
"We made a couple of hundred thousand euros of additional profit," he said.
