According to the First Epistle of John in the King James Bible “there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” (1 John 5:7).
Meanwhile down here on Earth three European airlines bear most impressive records.
According to their 2023 accounts, easyJet, Ryanair and Wizz Air carried nearly 314 million passengers between them, earning combined post-tax profits of EUR 2.1bn (GBP 1.7bn).
It is easy to imagine that European low-cost carriers (low-cos) are all the same. They are present in many markets and are well known to consumers.
Yet unlike the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost they are not all one. In fact they are all quite different. I decided to find out how their networks compare in respect of flights, routes, markets, aircraft utilisation and the sort of services they offer.
This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser. Thanks OAG! Visit www.oag.com.
I took a week of schedule data from the upcoming summer holiday season covering 12-Aug-24 to 18-Aug-24. In a later article we will look at how the three airlines change things for the winter as Christmas approaches.
The three airlines together have 49,159 flights and 9,638,105 seats in that week:
1. easyJet = 18,955 flights & 3,380,589 seats
2. Ryanair = 14,249 flights & 2,728,065 seats
3. Wizz = 15,955 flights & 3,529,451 seats.
It is worth pointing out that Ryanair achieves between three and four times the profits of easyJet and Wizz despite having fewer flights and seats.
The first surprise is how little they compete with each other. The table below shows that for easyJet only 17.0% of their capacity and 17.2% of their seats operates on routes where Ryanair also operates and the same statistics for the other combinations.
Across these three enormous airlines there are only five routes where all three operate. These represent 370 flights per week and 72,402 seats (0.8% of the total) and are shown in the map below.
The table and three maps below show that in total 20.3% of flights and 20.6% of seats operate on routes flown by more than one of these three low-cos.
Regional focus
easyJet & Ryanair, with a significant focus on north/south:
easyJet & Wizz, with a significant focus on northwest/southeast:
Ryanair & Wizz, with a significant focus on east/west:
To show how each airline’s international networks are constructed I defined the following groups of countries:
A full table showing the results can be found in the Appendix at the end of this article. It can be summarised as follows:
1. easyJet is by far the most geographically concentrated airline, with 76.2% of flights and 75.8% of seats to, from or within the north west, including 26.9% of their flights operating entirely within the north west - north west to south west (i.e. UK/Ireland to Spain/Portugal) is their most significant inter-regional flow, accounting for 30.5% of flights
2. Like easyJet, Ryanair also has significant intra-north west concentration (12.9% of flights) and 27.0% of their flights operate from north west to south west - unlike easyJet, Ryanair also have significant volume (12.6% of flights) on south west to south west (i.e. mainland Spain to the Canary Islands)
3. Wizz is much more geographically dispersed, with many flights all over the continent - I calculated a Herfindahl-style index of market concentration by summing the squares of the percentages referred to in 1 and 2; Wizz scores low (2.5% concentrated by flights and 4.0% by seats), Ryanair is more concentrated (7.2% by flights and 8.2% by seats) and easyJet much more concentrated (13.6% by flights and 13.2% by seats)
4. Wizz is the only one of the three to have a presence in Asia, with 1,561 weekly frequencies and 363,468 weekly seats shown in the map below.
Time of day
Fitting short-range services, most flights take off during waking hours. The table below shows that only 0.3% of easyJet flights and 0.1% of Ryanair flights take off during the truly anti-social slot of midnight to 4am. For Wizz however the proportion of flights in anti-social hours is much higher at 1.2%.
The map below shows that Wizz’s anti-social hours flights are not concentrated in any one region. They do, however, tend to flow west/east. I suspect that some of these flights operate to position an aircraft to do a nice business-friendly morning service the next day.
Stage lengths
The median easyJet flight is just over two hours long. The median Ryanair and Wizz flights are slightly longer at around two hours 20 minutes and two hours 35 minutes respectively. The table below shows that Wizz has only 40 flights under one hour while easyJet and Ryanair have 461 and 406 respectively.
All together the three airlines achieve 78,237 hours of flight a week, as follows:
1. easyJet = 29,544 hours a week, 92 hours per aircraft, 54.8% utilisation
2. Ryanair = 30,748 hours a week, 98 hours per aircraft, 58.9% utilisation
3. Wizz = 17,943 hours a week, 87 hours per aircraft, 51.8% utilisation.
Ryanair achieves the highest utilisation, but not to the extent that it can explain their 62% share of the combined profits for all three airlines. Their high profitability must be down to skill in selling ancillaries. But since the three airlines have similar stage length profiles, Ryanair must simply be more skilled in using the time available on the plane to sell extras.
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Appendix - full breakdown of region-to-region services
