easyJet has said its full-year revenues and costs would be slightly higher than expected. It is also maintaining its guidance for a 40-50 percent rise in annual earnings.

EasyJet also reported a 11.3 percent rise in July passenger traffic and said its load factor—a measure of how well it is filling seats—for the month was 90.4 percent.

Q3 performance indicators

At the time of the June traffic statistics, easyJet commented on the strong revenue performance for the quarter ended 30 June 2006 and upgraded its guidance for the full year. We are maintaining our guidance that pre-tax profit growth for the full year will be in the range of 40% to 50%, and we now expect full year capacity growth to be in the region of 13% and expect unit revenue and unit costs to be slightly higher than our previous guidance.

Throughout the quarter, unit revenue remained strong across the network, reflecting pro-active yield management and buoyant market conditions. Targeted marketing and promotional activity helped raise awareness, with the number of unique visitors to the website up 60% for the quarter compared to the same period the previous year. At the same time ancillary revenue was up 32% per seat year on year.

easyJet continues to expand and improve its customer offering through growing its network and improving schedule quality and routes offered. In the quarter easyJet started flying 19 new routes, among them further expansion from our youngest base at Milan Malpensa where we now operate 12 routes to destinations in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Greece, the UK and Portugal. 11 routes were also launched connecting UK bases in London, Scotland and Liverpool with various European destinations; and 4 routes began operating between bases in France and Switzerland and destinations in Italy, Spain, and Turkey. The easyJet footprint has expanded further outside the EU, and easyJet now serves 21 countries with the recent additions of Croatia, Turkey, and Morocco.

In June, easyJet announced plans for significant expansion from London Gatwick this winter with a new three-times daily service to Glasgow starting in October, and added frequencies on routes serving Madrid, Milan, Cologne, Athens, Berlin and Amsterdam. This has been partly facilitated by the re-deployment of aircraft from under performing routes. easyJet now operates 121 aircraft on 267 routes between 74 airport in 21 countries.

easyJet has also been nominated this year for a

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World Travel Award as Europe’s Leading Budget / No Frills Airline.
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