Ryanair boss warns of more expensive holiday flights as he hits out at chancellor

Pleasure, Wilfred. Pleased to be able to join you here from Dublin.

Sure. Well, the obvious and immediate one, Brit, we fly 12 routes to Jordan. We fly to Amman and Aqaba. They've been suspended until at least the end of May at the moment because it's not safe to fly over those Middle Eastern states with the amount of military activity that's ongoing. The wider ramifications at the moment are obviously the dramatic rise in oil prices. Oil prices have more than doubled since the war started the end of March in Iran. We're reasonably well hedged. We've about 80% of our fuel bought forward until March of 2027 at about $67 a barrel, but the unhedged 20% we're now paying almost double, about $150 a barrel for that. So costs are rising. The more immediate concern is jet fuel supplies and you know we together with our fuel suppliers are constantly looking at the marketplace. We don't expect any disruptions to supply until about early May. The fuel companies are happy there won't be any disruption until early May. But if the war continues, we do run the risk of supply disruptions in Europe in May and June and obviously we hope the war will finish sooner than that and that the risk to supply will be eliminated.

Again, it's almost impossible to know whether, you know, if the war finishes and the Straits of Hormuz reopen by the middle or end of April, then there's no risk to supply. If the war continues and the disruption of supply continues, we think there's a reasonable risk, you know, some low level, maybe 10, 20, 25% of our supplies might be at risk through May and June. So, like everybody else in the industry, we hope that this war ends sooner rather than later.

No, no, no, it's not linear like that. You know the fuel suppliers are giving us a kind of a worst case. They're talking about the middle of May at this stage. But in some cases there's no risk to supply because their Jet A1 is being sourced in the US, in Western Africa or in Norway. And some of the eastern airports in Eastern Europe we are dependent on, some of our suppliers are dependent on Jet A1 fuel coming from the Middle East so there'll be different impacts in different markets but at the moment we're reasonably certain there'll be no disruption in supply until about the middle of May. And obviously we would hope this war will finish before the end of April and then I think the risk of disruption will go away. However, the risk of significantly higher prices will remain through May, April, June. We've seen already some of our competitor airlines are cancelling flights. They've reduced their capacity by about 5%. Both Wizz and easyJet have cut capacity by about 5% through May and June. We haven't cut any flights. We think our supplies are secure and we intend to continue to grow through this crisis.

As you know it's a commodity with a worldwide supply. Ireland and the UK are not more exposed than the rest of continental Europe. Most of Europe takes most of its jet fuel supplies from America, Western Africa and Norway. There are some suppliers in the UK for example Q8 who would account for about 20% to 25% of fuel supplies at UK airports, they're more exposed to supplies coming through the Middle East. So different suppliers have different exposures but no one country in Europe, if there is a risk to supplies through May and June, I think it will impact most airports across most EU countries. We hope to avoid that. But you know that's why we all hope this war ends sooner rather than later.