Ryanair traffic rises 10% in February

Budget airline Ryanair has reported a 10% rise in traffic for last month.

Passenger numbers rose to 8.2m from 7.4m in January, while the load factor - which gauges how full the places are - nudged up two percentage points to 95%.

On a rolling annual basis, traffic was up 14% to 119.1m.

Chief marketing officer Kenny Jacobs attributed the performance to lower fares and the continuing success of the company’s "Always Getting Better" customer experience programme.

“Ryanair's lower fares and AGB services are leading to slightly higher than expected load factors in Q4 and accordingly we now expect full year traffic to just about hit 120m, up almost 13% over the 106.4m customers we carried in FY16,” he said.