By Ian McConnell
AIRLINE and package holiday operator Jet2 said yesterday it expects to report an underlying loss of between £375 million and £385m for the 12 months to March this year because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It declared “the continuing successful rollout of vaccines in the UK and the increasing momentum in Europe are both encouraging”.
However, while saying it welcomed “confirmation” on April 9 from the UK Government’s Global Travel Task Force that international travel “remained on track to reopen in mid-May”, Jet 2 declared: “We were disappointed at the lack of clarity contained in the Task Force’s report, in particular the as yet to be populated ‘traffic light’ framework for destinations, and full details and cost of the associated testing regime.”
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It added: “This means the impact and duration of the proposed Covid-19 travel restrictions for summer 21 remain difficult to determine and due to this continued uncertainty, in fairness to all our stakeholders and especially our customers, we took the difficult decision to extend the suspension of our flights and holidays from 17 May up to and including 23 June, by which time we are expecting more clarity.”
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Jet 2 revealed that, “unsurprisingly given the short-term uncertainty”, customers were booking significantly closer to departure for this summer.
It added: “However, we continue to be encouraged by the volume of customer bookings for both winter 21/22 and for summer 22, for which package holiday bookings are displaying a materially higher mix of the total.”
Jet2 said it expects to report a group loss from continuing operations of between £375m and £385m, before foreign exchange revaluation and taxation, for the year to March. It noted this compared with group profit from continuing operations, before “hedge ineffectiveness”, foreign exchange revaluation and taxation, of £264.2m for the prior financial year.
Jet2 shares rose 42.5p or 3% to 1458p.
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