Ryanair today has offered passengers an update on its progress at working through the cancellation of 2,100 of its 103,000 flights over the next six weeks.

The low-cost carrier has revealed it expects to have re-accommodated over 175,000 customers on other Ryanair flights – over 55 per cent of affected customers.

All 315,000 customers affected have now received an email advising them of their flight changes and offering alternative flights, refunds and EU261 notices.

By the end of today, more than 63,000 flight refunds will have been processed, Ryanair said, returning money to 20 per cent of affected customers.

Ryanair spokesman Kenny Jacobs said: “We apologise sincerely to each and every one of the 315,000 customers whose original flights were cancelled over a six week period in September and October, while we work to resolve this short term rostering failure.

“We have taken on extra customer service teams to speed up the rate at which we accommodate and action alternative flight requests or refund applications.

“We expect to have the vast majority of these completed by the end of this week.

“The vast majority of these requests are being dealt with online, but as our call centres and chat lines are extremely busy, we ask affected customers to bear with us as we do everything we can to respond to their requests and try to resolve any problems we have created for them, for which we again sincerely apologise.”

Ryanair expects to have processed over 300,000 alternative routings or refunds for customers - over 95 per cent of affected customers - by the end of this week.

The carrier earlier published the complete list of flights to be cancelled before the end of October.

Around 50 flights a day will be suspended from schedules as the low-cost carrier seeks to meet holiday requirements for pilots before the end of the year.

However, this only represents two per cent of planned departures, with Ryanair still offering around 2,450 flights a day.

Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said: “While over 98 per cent of our customers will not be affected by these cancellations over the next six weeks, we apologise unreservedly to those customers whose travel will be disrupted, and assure them that we have done our utmost to try to ensure that we can re-accommodate most of them on alternative flights on the same or next day.”