Stephen Furlong: Got it.
Michael O’Leary: Thanks, Neil. Thanks, Stephen. Next question, please.
Operator: Thank you. That comes from Muneeba Kayani at Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Muneeba Kayani: Good morning. On Italy, you talked about your market share of 40%. How does Lufthansa potentially taking the stake in ITA impact the Italian market in your view? And then secondly, you talked about the fares in your comments. For the March quarter, should we expect a similar 14% increase that we saw in the December quarter. We’ve heard from EasyJet suggesting higher fare increase for the March quarter.
Michael O’Leary: Yeah. Okay. Let me do the first one first. Italy, our market share is actually, I think, is now above . There’s been a dramatic withdrawal, I think, in the Italian market of Weeze through this time last year. We’re opening bases in Venice, in Wastania (ph), and one basin Palermo, all of which they’ve now closed as a kind of cover for. Now they have switched some of those aircraft into Milan and into Rome, where they appear to be now more intent on linking those the two main cities initially with Riyadh, Kuwait City, Reykjavik and all those other exciting medium haul destinations that Italians never knew they want to go to. But I think there’s probably a reasonable growth for them in that and it’s a market where they don’t have to compete with Ryanair.
But there is dramatically less capacity on the Italian domestic. And we are actually continuing to grow in those markets. We have this — so we’re adding extra flights into Castilian. We’re into Venice. We’re adding more aircraft in Naples, in — we recently — we’re coming close to agreeing airport deal extensions with a number of Castilian and Southern Italian airports, and I think we’ll see more growth by us in the Italian marketplace. Lufthansa coming in and acquiring ITA, I think, will have no effect whatsoever on that. I think they’ll do exactly what Lufthansa have done in every other acquisition of Sabina, Swiss, Austrian, they will run Asia to feed flights and traffic out of Italy into the two main hubs, Munich and Frankfurt. There will be no new route growth out of Italy to anywhere.
And they will be very happy and content to put up prices and shovels loss of Italians. And I think transatlantic and Asian visitors down into Italy using Munich and the Frankfurt hub. I think what they will also try to do, though, is use their lobbying muscle as they have in Germany to try to imposed restrictions or limit the way Italian airports can kind of grow and try to — they do the usual lobbying games around trying to persuade the Italian government in some way should protect Asia or Lufthansa, have less competition, more slot restrictions, that all Italian airports should charge the same fees as Rome and Milan which is something they pushed hard after the German market as well, which is one of the reasons why the German market has only recovered 70% of its pre-COVID traffic, and German consumers and business are paying much higher airfares.
So I think the only impact on the Italian market would be Lufthansa lobbying, but there certainly won’t be any ITA growth out of that. And we are allocating another, I think we’re probably another 15, 16 aircraft into the Italian market this year, continue to grow the domestic markets. We’re looking at more capacity in almost all of our Italian airports. And I think we will get to 50% market share in Italy within the next two years based on current trends. Maybe please, do you want to give us a question let’s be cautious now. I don’t think — I think we should be reasonably cautious on pricing up to March. But what are you seeing there on pricing up to the end of the fourth quarter?
Tracey McCann: Yeah. I think based on what we’ve seen already in Q3, I think we see total revenue per passenger coming really hope the same kind of percentage levels as they were in pre-COVID I think it’s on the basis of what we’ve seen was a strong new year, which we pretty much January don’t what we’re seeing for February mid-term looks good, but it’s still a lot on what will happen and the close in mid-term book because I think a lot is dependent on.
Michael O’Leary: I didn’t understand. We’ve gone back to the same as we saw pre-COVID.
Tracey McCann: The same short percentage levels that we’ve seen in Q3 of .
Michael O’Leary: Okay. So we think low double digits.
Tracey McCann: Yeah.
Michael O’Leary: Okay. And again, I would caution everybody that is subject to there being no adverse COVID, no adverse Ukraine. And as always, when things look is good, no Black Swan event that arrive out and over to haunt us. Thanks, Tracy. Next question, please.
Operator: Thank you. That comes from the line of Sathish Sivakumar at Citi. Please go ahead.
Sathish Sivakumar: Hi. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, again. I got two questions here. So firstly, on the load factor, if you look at December came at 92%. Given the seasonality impact that we normally see in Q4 versus Q3, could we expect the Q4 load factor to come in below Q or what is going to see that uptick into Q4, March quarter? And secondly, on the cost, what has been the initial discussions from ATC on proposed increase in charges for 2023? Those are my two questions. Thank you.
Michael O’Leary: Okay. Load factor, I wouldn’t get into that kind of — I would expect to see the load factor in Q4 maybe 1 percentage points or 2 percentage points behind where it was in Q3. Again, we know Easter in April. Most of what drives the load factor in Q3 is you have a strong October, school midterms in October and then most of Eastern New Year falls into December. But we would never get into a quarterly load factor kind of forecast there. ATC charges are going to be up this year. I’m not again €“ Tracy, do you want to give us a figure on that?
