People 'watching their pennies' contributed to a 46% drop in Ryanair's profits in the first quarter of the year, the airline's Chief Financial Officer says.
Profits at the Irish carrier fell to €360m compared to the same period last year as traffic grew 10% to 55.5 million passengers.
The airline said it was also hit by a "significant deterioration" in European Air Traffic Control capacity which caused multiple flight delays and cancellations in the last 10 days of June.
Ryanair Chief Financial Officer Neil Sorahan told Breakfast Business it was a good quarter for customers.
"We saw average fares down 15% where, effectively, the first half of Easter had fallen into March of last year so that had an impact," he said.
"The consumers, I suppose, [who are] coming [off] two years of double-digit fare growth and double digit traffic growth, were just a little bit more frugal."
"So while traffic was strong... we had to do a little bit more price stimulation than we had originally anticipated - but very good news for the consumer".
A passenger places hand luggage in the overhead bin on a Ryanair aircraft, 5-6-19. Image: ZUMA Press, Inc. / AlamyMr Sorahan said people still want to travel but are looking to pay less.
"There's no shortage of flights; we're taking in half a million bookings a night, we're carrying over 600,000 people a day," he said.
"They absolutely want to get away; they're just minding the pennies about more than they were.
"We can see travellers all across Europe travelling in huge numbers but they're just paying a little bit less to do so.
"Our strategy has been for many years to fill the planes and we'll take whatever the price is".
Dublin Airport
Mr Sorahan warned that Dublin Airport could see a price spike due to the passenger cap in place.
"Dublin could be a significant outlier this year alright with capacity constraints, particularly into the winter," he said.
"We're looking very much at a situation where mid-term breaks, Christmas, sporting events could see a spike in pricing.
"This is something that needs to be addressed urgently by the Government.
"It's an arbitrary cap that was put in place back in 2007 - there's absolutely no reason why it should be there".
IT outage
Ryanair was one of several carriers hit by a major IT outage last week. Mr Sorahan said the majority of people got to their destination.
"It was a third party [issue], totally outside of our control," he said.
"It was not the easiest day we've had – but in fairness to our operations people and our IT team they do practice going manual on a regular basis.
"So the vast majority of people flying with last Friday got to where they wanted to go - albeit delayed on the day.
"We don't have a relationship with CrowdStrike but our third-party reservation provider does".
Mr Sorahan added that while the airline has taken delivery of 156 of Boeing B737 Gamechanger aircraft it is still "20 shy" of what they were meant to receive due to to delivery delays.
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