Michael O'Leary
Management
Welcome. Sorry we ran slightly over on the press conference there, so we're running just a couple of minutes behind. Joining me is Howard Millar, as you know, our deputy CEO and CFO. We're going to briefly run through the slide presentation. I'd do this quickly because you've seen a significant amount of it before, and then we'll open it up to questions and answers. Strong for the half year numbers this morning. We're still technically in the offer period for Aer Lingus. Our offer is now going to Phase 2 regulatory process with Brussels so therefore, I can't really comment any detail in Aer Lingus. That's just the kind of the usual fully replaced half covering we need to call to [ph] . Europe's also only ultra-low cost carrier continues to grow very strongly with the lowest-fare, lowest-cost model continues to succeed dramatically across Europe. And interestingly, statistics is that our excluding fuel per passenger cost of EUR 26 in the half year is now more than 50% lower than our next closest competitor, easyJet, and significantly lower than any of the other European competitors. As a result, we're growing strongly 79 million passengers on 1,500 routes from 51 bases across Europe. In terms of fares, the Ryanair average fare in the half-year was EUR 53. easyJet's average fare is more than 50% higher. And everybody else that we're competing with in Europe, which is where a lot of the growth opportunity will come from in the current years, average fare is more than double those of Ryanair. Customer service this year continues to improve despite what you might read in the media over the summer. We've got a phenomenal on-time performance. 93% of all flights this summer on time, rather that was helped by the fact that there…