Perfect! Let's see then if we get the microphone to work. Do you all hear me, yeah? Very good. Well, listen, first of all, thank you very much for joining us here today to discuss our trading and business update for full year 2023. With me together to do that is Kenton Jarvis, our CFO, and I'm also accompanied by our esteemed colleagues from the Airline Management Board here as well. I think everybody is here now. I would like to take the opportunity to, you know, encourage you when we do, you know, the Q&A, after we're gonna go through the presentation, that feel free to direct the question to any one of my colleagues in here for their specific targets and subject areas as well. Really make sure you use that.
I think we'll also be around after the presentation if you wanna have a more in-depth discussion with any one of ourselves as well. Listen, you should have been sent the slides, I think, alongside the announcement that we released earlier this morning. And of course, also all the documents are available on our corporate website as well. Let me start before we actually dive into the presentation here, that this is a very exciting point in time for the company. We just delivered a record Q3, a record Q4, the best summer really ever in the company's history, and that is actually despite the fact that this was all, you know, a smooth operating environment.
You know, there were a number of issues and challenges, whether that was ATC across the whole of the network, whether that was staff shortages at the tower in Gatwick, that impacted us a lot because of our size at Gatwick, or wildfires as an example. But I think what it, what it does, it demonstrates that we are able to really deliver and perform exceptionally well in circumstances that are far less from perfect. So we are really pleased with that, and this is driven by really two things. One is that there has been a strong demand, make no mistake, particularly for beach and for leisure.
But also because of the initiatives that we have talked about in this room with all of you and others in the last few years, that sits within the strategic framework that I come on to talk about, that is starting to really delivering, which we all have said, when we're putting capacities and volume back into the system. And that's really the basis why we believe we have a fantastic foundation then also then to move on to our next step. And also then with new and more ambitious medium-term targets that we're gonna set up today. Because today, we will show you, and we have said this morning, if we go on to the next slide, that we are largely delivering now on the midterm targets that we set out in 2021.
The targets that was around the low to medium ROCE, the medium EBITA margin, and also their holidays business, to be able to deliver over GBP 100 million. With the confidence of having been doing that, and with the confidence to see the believers that we have, who have contributed to that, we feel also very excited about setting out more ambitious, but credible targets also to give us a different level of returns for our shareholders. That's what we're gonna talk through today. Underpinning this is then also a new capital allocation framework, which will include also resumption of payments of dividends to our shareholders. Kenton will talk you through that as part of this morning's meeting.
And then we can also give you an update on the proposed agreement we have now reached with Airbus for a fleet order to follow on from the current existing fleet order that we have that will take us up to 2029, 2028, and then from 2029 and onwards to 2034, will give us the opportunity to continue the journey of upgauging and continue then to help us and support our sustainability targets and grow also at the slot-constrained airport, which is really at the key of what our strategy is. So we're gonna talk more about that as well. But before we dive into that presentation, I'm gonna hand over to Kenton to go through the key headline numbers for the year gone by.
Thank you, Johan. Morning, everybody. We'll have a look at slide three on the presentation. So we expect profit before tax for the financial year 2023 to be between GBP 440 million and GBP 460 million, which is in line with our company-compiled consensus. We had a record Q4 performance, with headline profit before tax of between GBP 650 million and GBP 670 million. Passenger numbers in the quarter grew by 8% year-on-year, and revenue per seat was up 9%, which is just shy of the kind of circa 10% guidance that we gave in July. In H2, airline cost per seat ex fuel reduced 1.3% year-on-year, and that's ahead of the guidance that we gave broadly flat.
That means that this summer, we've delivered the highest PBT in the company's history, despite the elevated price of fuel and the disruption we saw. easyJet Holidays delivered approximately GBP 120 million profit before tax in the financial year, and this was achieved with a 77% growth in customers and a 200% profit growth in what's only the company's second year of full trading. Given the financial performance in full year 2023, alongside easyJet's strong liquidity position, the board intends to pay a dividend of 10% of full year 2023's headline profit after tax, payable in early 2024. It's the expectation that this will rise to 20% of headline profit after tax, payable on the full year 2024 in early 2025. And then future levels of return will be assessed over the coming years.
Now moving on to the outlook. This winter, we're increasing the airline's capacity by circa 15% in Q1. The ticket yields are ahead year-on-year, and our load factor has built up to 55% for that quarter, which is in line with where we'll be in the prior year. The increase in productivity and utilization, this additional capacity drives, is expected to lead to a slight reduction in the airline cost per seat ex-fuel in Q1 year-on-year. It's an encouraging start on our journey to reduce winter losses. However, we're mindful of the current elevated fuel price, and we'll continue to monitor trading as we move through the coming months. What we do know is that customers look for value in times like these, and easyJet is very well positioned with our leading network at slot-constrained primary airports.
So I'll just hand back to Johan now.
Very good. So let me then talk you through the new medium-term targets that we're setting out based on achieving largely the ones that we currently have had. So first of all, when we're looking at what we wanna try to achieve, we wanna set ourselves up the ambition to get to a PBT number on a profit per seat of GBP 7-10. So if you think about where we stand and where we're about to end up in this year, that would be a PBT of seat that would just go below GBP 5. And we're gonna demonstrate also the levers we have on how we think we credibly can get there. Now, that level of profitability per seat will give us the ROIC of high teens.
We can also then, in addition to that, see the holidays business really go beyond the GBP 250 million, with a GBP 120 million that they have delivered here than today. And we can also then announce a growth map on the journey that we are on, that is based on flexibility, and is based on a disciplined way where we're allocating the growth that's gonna deliver the highest returns for, for the company. But in order just to demonstrate to you also the credibility about how to, to get there, if you're looking at the building blocks that we have laid out here, some of these things is actually not depending on any magical solution that needs to happen. It's actually just things that are there, almost mechanically, that will drive and will yield us benefit.
The reduction of the winter losses that I said, despite the fact we're delivering them between GBP 440 million-GBP 460 million in the year ended, that included a loss over the winter, over GBP 400 million, GBP 411 million. The opportunity to reduce that loss and to drive a better year-on-year performance is obvious. It wasn't, and I will show that later on as well, it wasn't last winter that we didn't get the contribution per block hour. It was just that we didn't have enough of the capacity in it to get, you know, contribution towards our fixed costs. That is actually what we now are then looking to change as we're adding in the capacity to some of the most demand routes in here in Q1 and also in the winter.
The upgauging, that is automatic. The cost saving of GBP 3 per seat as the 319s are leaving the fleet here within the next 4-5 years will be the last one, that the 319 goes as well. That is just there because it is being replaced by A320s and A321s. And by the way, we are also now converting another 35 A321s within the current order book as well. That will help that going forward. So that's just there, which will help and improve our, our cost base versus competitors. The holidays, which we'll talk about separately as well, like I said, you know, we, we— I was asked question outside in here when— by somebody to say that when we started this, did we think it was gonna make GBP 250 million?
First of all, we could see that the idea was really having merit, and then it's been executed exceptionally well. And we can also see along this journey from last year's profit of GBP 38 million to this year's GBP 120 million, that there's really no limit on that. You almost have to ask yourself, what is gonna happen for it to not to get there? And we couldn't come up with things that really weren't things that we thought we could mitigate. So you got that, and then you then have a number of other initiatives, part of those that I've been talking to you about before, that has more legs to go at. It will deliver more contribution to, to the overall performance of, of the company, but it all really sits within the framework of, of our plan.
The mission we have is to deliver sustainably over GBP 1 billion. That's what we believe that this company are able to do on a sustainable basis, and then go beyond that. Those are the next medium-term targets and the milestones that we're setting out. If I take you on to the next slide, you would have seen this slide before, and, you know, I rarely do a presentation or a meeting without having this slide up, whether that is internally or whether that is externally. This is easyJet's strategy. This is internally, just so you know, it is well understood, it brings clarity, it helps us to know where we're gonna allocate resources and initiatives, and the best people that's gonna deliver great value for the company.
Building on Europe's best network, we believe by far, we have an incredible asset in the positions that we have at Europe's biggest and primary airport. And that attractiveness and the value of those positions will only increase as things becomes more and more constrained going forward. Transforming the revenue, we made a step change, as you would have known, in the work that we've been doing in Sophie and Sophie's team about ancillaries, basically delivering over GBP 1 billion that we didn't have in revenue coming on to this. And we can now see that this is sustainably at a level, and we can believe it, we can take it also on, on from there. Reliability is extremely important for ourselves to deliver a great experience to our customers, and we are, in many cases, doing that.
I will also demonstrate when we're looking through the on-time performance at a major airport, and the way consumers look at us and regard the brand, that we're still in an exceptionally good position versus our competitors and the perception from our customers. Continue to capitalize on the low-cost model with the efficiency we have, with the scale that we have, with the updation that we have ahead of ourselves as well. I think we also demonstrated this summer, when you're looking at the cost per seat development as well, that compared to competitors, it is definitely something that is in good control, and we're looking for that to continue to be flat as we go in also then for this winter.
We know that this is working, and we know that this is gonna be underlying basis for delivering really strong and sustainable value for our shareholders. Let's look into then, you know, each and every one of them as well. I'll start off with two slides on the network as well. One of the big things we have in here is the changes we have done to this network. We have moved, you know, close to 50 aircraft around since 2019 to allocate the aircraft into bases and routes where we drive the highest yields, the best return. One of the things that we've seen, and one of the important things we had, was this opportunity to reduce the winter losses, and ultimately, ultimately, the ambition will be to make profit in the winter.
We've done that before, and we believe we can do that again, but the first step is really to reduce the losses we had from last year. As you can tell from the slide here on the bottom left, that we actually, you know, despite the result that we had overall in the GBP 411 million loss of last winter, the contribution per block hour was actually over and above what we've seen historically, also in 2019. But we didn't have enough of the volume to contribute towards the fixed cost. So that is the change where we're doing now, and that volume is being allocated to the thickest routes and the most popular routes that we have. So it provides a, kind of a low-risk way of adding on capacity without dilution also on, on the yield.
If you can then take a look at the capacity growth and see where this is allocated in terms of the segments of the network, we're adding 14% into our beach and the leisure. And this has actually been something that has been, you know, very strong throughout the whole of the summer, and it continues to be an exceptionally strong performer for us here over the winter. We see also that city is definitely coming back. If we're looking at the day-to-day trading, it is probably one of the things that we're seeing the strongest returns to, particularly also in the late here. We have a little bit more of a mixed performance when it comes to the domestic.
Certain parts is doing well, certain parts is doing less well, but I think it's a mixed performance that follow us also on from the growth that we've seen in the summer, and we're adding capacity also into the Swiss fleet. So the way we are, you know, allocating the assets is really about what drives the best return for the company. So on to the next slide, then.
One thing that I think we haven't shown before, and we did this exercise now to say, when we measure our success about increasing our presence at the slot-constrained airport, we have made quite a significant shift in order to take a better presence, you know, a better position at the way IATA, as an example in this case, defines what constitutes a constrained airport or a constrained airport at peak times, which is really where you see, you know, the best returns coming in. We have moved up our presence in there, about 5% on the fully constrained. We moved up our position with 9 points at the constrained, at the peak times as well.
Actually, that makes this network and the value of that, where we do generate over and above the network average in terms of contribution per block hour. And this is the key thing to—a nd I think we've discussed that sometimes, well, you know, what are the things that demonstrate that this is working? Where we can see that when matured capacity are coming in, it will almost always deliver over and above the average of, of the network. So that is something that we are very focused to continue to deliver on. The upgauging, just the three A319s that leaving the fleet here, that's gonna deliver that capacity growth of 6% here over that to 2028. We're looking also then for growth opportunities within the core market. So if you're taking near term now, we're adding capacity into next summer to Manchester.
We're adding capacity into Bristol, Liverpool, some of the highest, you know, performing bases that we have. We are opening a new base, as you know, in Birmingham. We're opening up a seasonal base. We continue on the trajectory to increase our presence on the seasonal basis, so we have the flexibility to fly in to the European core markets, with an attractive cost base. Alicante is being launched then for summer 2024. We are also, as you would expect, evaluating new markets, but there is nothing on that, that we can announce today, but we don't rule that out. I don't think that there is a case where we actually go and feel that we need new markets.
We still have things and capacity to go within the existing network to really densify these routes, because it does drive a better return for us when we can do that. So opportunities are there for the growth that we have available for us. But I'd also like to point out that the fleet that we have also includes flexibility. And the fleet that we will have, going on from 29 to 34, also will have flexibility, and we have a graph on that later, I think, in your presentation that shows that you're about where we can max out on the fleet and where we can also then minimize the fleet, which I think is really, really important and a responsible thing to do. So we get the best of the two worlds in there.
If I'm looking on to the areas of transformation of the revenue, it's been an absolutely amazing revenue story since the last three, four years, within 2019 as well. That GBP 1 billion was something that we didn't have before, and it's linked very much into an increased demand for the ancillaries that we are offering now. It's one of the things that we are looking at, and it was asked a question on the media call this morning as well, you know, is this us just, you know, throwing things at people that they have to buy? This is very much what people want to buy. There are demand in the things we're doing.
So we're now sitting at 29% of the total purchase price that sits within the ancillaries, 29%-30%, and it's been there sustainably now since 2021. So we know it's not gonna come down, and we have further opportunities to grow on there. We're also looking to see how we can continue to develop the algorithms that we're doing. I think we were the first, really, the first airline who started doing dynamic pricing on the ancillaries, and I think we are the leading airline in terms of adopting and benefiting from the fact that we can actually do dynamic pricing on all the ancillaries, and that is something that makes absolutely sense. It gives us opportunity to really optimize performance on something that is a relatively big part of the spend for the customer anyway.
Better merchandising, easier to book on the website, easier to book on the app, to make the conversions better than, than it is today, are also things that we have ahead of ourselves in the pipeline. I talked to you about the in-flight retail before, that we changed it to a new model, where we basically are removing the intermediary. We're going straight to making contractual arrangements with the suppliers directly, because we wanna have a, you know, better deal agreed commercially with the suppliers. We wanna also have a better influence over the, the, the stock that we're providing to drive customer demand, because we believe that that is, very much at the bottom of why this is also good. If you don't have people who want to buy this, they won't do that.
We're really pleased to see that following through this summer as well, we've seen a big increase when it comes on the spend per seat, and then also on the profit per seat, which is now delivering GBP 0.60 versus the previous model, GBP 0.42. We feel very confident in the medium term that the in-flight retail will get up to GBP 1 per seat on profits over this term. This is very much driven by, you know, a more exact arrangements in terms of what we're offering on board, and other additional ways on how to merchandise this, that we know is also gonna be, you know, what the customer wants to do.
If you're then coming on to the next slide of easyJet holidays, and it's just been a phenomenally year for the holidays business, and Garry and his team has done an outstanding job on something that actually nobody else can replicate. I’ve talked to you before about this when we launched this idea, and what we seen last year as well. It builds upon a couple of things that just this airline has, that no airline has. We're the biggest airline into the leisure and the beach destinations from the primary airport in Europe. We have a brand that is being trusted, that extends itself over and above in the confidence to put trust in that I can also book a holiday here, not only the flight in here. That is proven to be the case.
And the traffic that is being generated of easyJet.com being one of the most visited, you know, websites in terms of travel and flying, benefits the holidays business. So you take the network, the trust in the brand, and on also the fact that there's a lot of fantastic free traffic that comes to, to this business, means that we have really no limits of, of where this can grow. So currently, we're sitting at a market share in the U.K. of just about 5%, and to get to that over 250 million, we expect that to be around 10%.
If you're then adding on also the additional source markets, like we have launched Switzerland now for 2024, and there will be other launch markets be announced here later in the calendar year as well, we can see that that will contribute also further to the growth of this business. But the key core opportunities going forward still is here in the U.K.. So it's, it's a great thing. It is the highest margin-generation company within this sector. It is the lowest cost, and it's the fastest-growing, and it's built on this idea that I think cannot be replicated elsewhere. So if you then go on to the next slide, and that's this part of that revenue transformation that the company has been doing, delivering ease and reliability.
When we were in, in last summer, you know, we saw that there were challenges really across the whole of the ecosystem innovation. You know, whether that was ground handlers, whether that was airlines and, you know, ourselves, you know, were suffering from a shortage of the crew at the early part of last summer, which we then corrected. You saw air traffic control being an issue, airports had issue. This year it has been very much driven by air traffic control disruption. That has been the main challenges that has still prevailed and hasn't become any better. I think particularly also then in Gatwick, which has been well documented because of the staff shortages that has impacted us the most because of our size there.
We came in and started to prepare for this summer, actually in June, July last summer, and we come into this having been fully crewed into this operation, and we can see that despite what we had our house in order, there was still gonna be disruption along the way. We took actions to mitigate that. We adjusted the programs, and from when we adjusted the program, we could see that we were delivering, you know, a very good schedule. If I take the statistics here for the summer, and I'm looking at the on-time performance out of the major airlines across 10 of our largest airports, which would represent well over 50% of easyJet's overall capacity, we are number one and number two.
And I think it demonstrates also the focus that we have and the ability we have to, within this model, deliver, you know, a great experience versus some of our competitors. If I then looking through also the perception of the brand, because it was challenging throughout the summer, there was a lot of attention around this, rightly so, as you could expect. We could see that the status of the brand and the way the consumers regard us is still very high. We're being regarded as the best airline in some of our core market when it comes to value, from everyone including.
And if you're looking at the competition of low-cost airlines, we are regarded as number one on a number of the key components that really matters, and we know is driving decision-making for customers when they're choosing the airline that they're gonna fly for. So this is not something that we're saying, "Okay, well, that's fine. We're kind of done with this." This is just to say, this is where the starting point is now, as we are now preparing for great experiences over the peak winter that's coming ahead, whether that is half-term, whether that is Christmas, New Year, and, and, and the spring, but then also now engaging to set ourselves up within this environment for a great summer next year. I don't think necessarily that the air traffic control issues will go away, go away next summer.
We certainly would expect Gatwick and NATS to have sorted out their resilience in there, and we will obviously monitor that and stay very close to that. But I do think that we will also then look into our schedule to make sure that the flow restrictions that taking place across Europe for various congestions is something that we can cope with in a way that will reduce the cost. And the reduction of the disruption cost, I think, will far overachieve any lack we will have in efficiency of the program we're putting up for sale and operate. So we're gonna continue to be absolutely focused to deliver a great experience for our customer as well.
Moving on to the next, our driver, our low-cost model, where we talked about this, the opportunity we have with the fleet upgauging, which is really purely mechanical in terms of the fact that you're getting two benefits in. Well, you're actually getting three benefits out of this. One, you're getting the cost savings, and you can see how the gauge progression now takes place. If we then also move forward with the proposed aircraft order here from 2029, that currently we're sitting have an average gauge of 179 seats. That would go to the low 190s at the end of 2028, and at the end of 2034, it will be in the low 200s. This is a confirmation that this journey is continuing.
It will give us the opportunity also to continue to grow within this period on slot-constrained airport without having to take on more slots. And you've seen there are some airports now who just basically are saying that, "Look, it's not only gonna be that we can't operate more volume." Some are saying, "Well, we're gonna retract some of the volume and the movement in here." So regardless of what happen, we're gonna have a benefit that no other airline have today, if you're looking through the fleet orders they have, that's gonna provide this upgauging benefit to ourselves. And that is something that is really good.
The third point is, of course, that this helps to support us to really tick the box on where we wanna get to in terms of our net zero roadmap, because this changes in the fleet and the upgauge of the fleet also reduces the carbon intensity that we have, so we can achieve the 2035 SBTi target that we have. This is really, really important for ourself. Capacity restoration in the winter, as you will see on the right-hand side of the slide at the bottom, will give us benefit both in terms of aircraft utilization and then also productivity benefits that actually gonna, you know, make a, you know, a contribution really on, on our way to reducing winter losses that is of significance as well. That's the reason why these things are important.
And then we, of course, have a number of cost initiatives anyway, efficiency initiative, to make sure we really get the best value at the lowest cost possible. And I think, as I said earlier, that we demonstrated here in the summer, and now with the guidance that we have for the winter and the quarter, that we are well in control of our cost base, and we actually are increasing our competitive edge versus full service carriers. And then on average, where we haven't been in the same place as some other low-cost areas, the way we see that now, we're starting to shrink that gap, and that's the ambition of what we want to continue to do. So moving then forward to sustainability travel.
I just do an update on this as well, because we can tick the box on a number of things that's gonna lead us into that net zero by 2050 and the science-based target initiatives by 2035. It's good to see that after one year, we're ahead of the curve. Let's just continue to hope that, that remains the same. This has been driven a lot within David's area about operational efficiency measures that we have, the optimization of the descent profile as an example, that has delivered better for us than we thought it was gonna do. We also have some more, you know, key strategic boxes we can tick off as well.
One, that we now have a proposed order that's gonna take us to that 2034, 2035 mark in terms of carbon intensity with the new proposed order we have with Airbus. We have provided, you know, guaranteed supply of the SAF that's gonna be needed in the next few years, and we're already discussing also then the follow-up from that. We are the first airline that are joining now, and you might have seen that in the press as well, Airbus new initiatives when it comes to the carbon removal technologies.
Because regardless on how you look at that, in order to get to the 2050 net zero, there will be elements that we just simply, yeah, can't avoid, and that's why the DACCS technologies and carbon removal technologies will be necessary for us, as it will be for others. So we're very excited to be the first airline to join Airbus on that initiative. So with that, I'm gonna hand over to Kenton to talk us through the proposed new aircraft order.
Thanks again. Right. Well, this morning we announced a new proposed aircraft order, and this is for deliveries from 2029 to 2034 window. The aircraft order firms up easyJet's order book for the next 10 years, which is necessary as both OEMs are now sold out until the end of the decade. Alongside certainty of supply, the consistent renewal of our fleet allows easyJet to replace the aging aircraft while delivering significant sustainability benefits. The fleet modernization will drive profitability due to the substantial fuel and carbon efficiencies that the neo aircraft provide, alongside the upgauging benefit ahead of us. Finally, the terms secured represent extremely attractive value, with improved economics for future deliveries based on the commercial terms and the fleet mix. Now moving on to slide 16, and the order book itself.
As you know, under our current order, order book, we have already got 69 Airbus A320neo family aircraft, and a further 158 firm orders are still to be delivered by 2028. This order will replace all 95 of our A319s and some of the older A320ceo aircraft within the fleet today. And certainly, this will significantly move our average gauge from 179 today to the low 190s. An opportunity that no other airline has in this time period to upgauge. Today, we've announced a proposed agreement with Airbus for the delivery of a further 157 aircraft between 2029 and 2034, as well as 100 purchase rights. The 157 firm orders are gonna be split 56 A320neos and 101 A321neos.
Now, you always have flexibility to, to move between the, the types, but that's the initial order. Given that the order has a larger proportion of A321neos, this represents a further upgrading opportunity, which means the average gauge will continue to increase to the low 200s by 2034. I should also point out, as part of this process to secure our longer-term fleet proposition, we've agreed with Airbus the ability to convert 35 of our A320neos to A321neos within the current order book, i.e., delivering before 2028. So that's an additional benefit to our gauge and fleet efficiency program. Just a reminder why upgauging is so important. It provides a low-risk opportunity for us to grow in our slot-constrained airports and markets, but it also provides substantial cost benefits, not just from fuel, but from navigation charges, crew, pilots.
We get benefits throughout the P&L, engineering and maintenance as well, on a per seat basis. In total, this means easyJet now has 315 aircraft on order and 100 purchase rights up until 2034, which will deliver on our fleet modernization, sustainability, and growth ambitions. The terms agreed under today's proposed aircraft purchase with Airbus represent extremely good value, with improved economics for future deliveries based on the commercial terms and the fleet mix. Okay, let's look at the process. We thought it'd be helpful to give you a bit more detail about the bid process, which was very competitive and did involve all the relevant OEMs. Airbus was selected as our partner, as they provided us with superior economic offer, as well as the ability to convert the 35 A320neo deliveries into A321s between now and 2028.
In other words, enhancing our existing order book in addition to the proposed new order. The competitive tender process started in December 2022 and culminated in a recommendation from the board made yesterday. As part of the process, we have now moved into exclusive negotiations with CFM for the supply of the engines for this order book. The order book allows us to replace all the A319s with approximately half of the A320ceos and will deliver the significant lower fuel burn, resulting in reduced carbon dioxide emissions and operating costs. As you can see on the chart, an A320neo actually burns less fuel per flight than an A319, but it's got 19% more seats, and that gives the average fuel burn benefit of 24%. And when we move from an A320 to an A321neo, that will deliver a 20% less fuel burn per seat.
Not only will this improve our fuel efficiency and our cost position, but it's also a key lever in delivering the net zero roadmap that Johan showed us. More detail than we've previously given on where the fleet may go. Slide 18 provides this detail on the fleet plan out to 2033, by which time easyJet will have one of the most modern and efficient fleets in Europe. Our fleet currently stands at 336 aircraft at the 30th of September. Our base plan would increase our fleet by 38% to 464 aircraft, not including the 100 purchase rights in the proposed aircraft order. As I said, all of our A319s, you can see, are retired by 2030, and 80% of our aircraft will be NEOs by full year 2033.
We also have the flexibility to ramp this up or down, as you can see from the dotted lines that sit on that graph. As I've already mentioned, we have two upgauging opportunities ahead of us. The first, with the current order book, where the average gauge will increase by more than 6%, and then the second, from 28-33, where we'll see another gauge increase of approximately 5%. This proposed fleet order, like our current order book, will be paid for by a combination of internal resource, cash flow generated from the business, sale and leasebacks, and debt. There are no plans for shareholders to fund any part of this transaction. Okay, let's move along now to the capital allocation framework. Capital allocation is a key part of our decision-making process as we look to create long-term shareholder value.
I'll now talk you through our capital allocation framework, and how I see easyJet's capital discipline and structure, alongside the key metrics we are focused on in order to maximize shareholder returns. We're really focused on capital discipline, and what that means is driving greater returns from our existing capital employed, which is basically our fleet. We've done this, and we do this by constantly optimizing the network to allocate aircraft to the highest returning bases and routes, and by maximizing revenue streams from those seats through our ancillary product offering, but also from the low risk, low capital expansion of easyJet holidays. Our low-cost model means we'll always seek to maximize aircraft utilization and maintain fleet flexibility. We're already very efficient in the summer, given the network we have, but we see an opportunity to improve efficiency through the winter period and in the shoulder months.
I expect the planned capacity increases this coming winter to help deliver a further 10% improvement in aircraft utilization year-on-year for H1. This, along with other improvements in cockpit and crew productivity, will help reduce winter losses going forward. We have the ability within our fleet to grow at a CAGR of around 5% over the next 5 years. However, we will be disciplined and have the flexibility, as I said, to ramp this up or down, depending on the economic environment, but also of the opportunities we see within the primary slot constraint network. Our investment in the Airbus NEO order book will allow us to modernize the fleet, driving substantial fuel and carbon efficiencies alongside upgauging benefits. So if we now look at the capital structure element.
During 2023, we've made significant progress reducing our gross debt by GBP 1.2 billion. We'll be further deleveraging this month, as we have a EUR 500 million bond, which is about to mature, and this will be paid down through our cash holdings. Our strong investment-grade balance sheet gives us a platform to invest in profitable growth while retaining enough liquidity to withstand any industry shocks. We currently have 4.5 billion of liquidity, which is well in excess of our policy to hold customer monies plus GBP 500 million buffer, and our unearned revenue at the year end is about 1.5 billion. So our kind of internal liquidity policy would be 2 billion against that 4.7.
We now own 74% of the NEO aircraft in our fleet, and this is a key metric to focus on, as the value of the fleet going forward will sit within the NEO aircraft type. That's why we'll continue to build the ownership percentage of these aircraft with all 2024 deliveries, with all full year 2024 deliveries to be taken direct into ownership, further strengthening easyJet's balance sheet. Maintaining both capital discipline and the right capital structure will enable us to drive industry-leading returns from our capital employed, and therefore create value for our shareholders. Today, we're also announcing that the board intends to reinstate a dividend effective from the year ending 30th of September 2023, with a payout ratio of 10% for this year, paid at the start of 2024.
This is expected to rise to 20% in the 2024 financial year. The board will continue to review this over the coming years, where we believe there is scope to further increase this, depending on the progress we make towards delivering the new medium-term targets, our CapEx funding requirements, and the wider economic environment. I'll now hand back to Johan.
Very good. Thank you for that, Kenton. And I'll just conclude and summarize with this slide as well. That captures, you know, the introduction and when I went through the strategy as well. So we achieved the current medium-term target that we set out earlier than expected. To a large proportion, we're setting out new ones now, more ambitious. We demonstrated the credibility on how we can get there. We have underlying a plan, a strategic plan, and a framework that really works, that is well understood within the company. We know exactly what to do and where we're allocating resources and people if we want to do that, building around the network, continued transformation of what we've been doing on the revenue capabilities, delivering ease and reliability, and then also capitalize on the low-cost model that we have.
Together with the capital allocation framework that Kenton had talked about today, including the resumption of the dividends as well, and a really, really strong balance sheet that I think you wouldn't find that a lot of other European airlines have in the industry. We're in a great position to sustainably deliver great shareholder value going forward. So very much, I'll finish off with that, and then we will go on to the Q&A.
Good morning. It's James Hollins from BNP Paribas. A few for me, please. Starting with Kenton, full year 2024 costs, we've had some good guidance on H1. I was wondering if you're in a position to think or let us think about how you'd see full year 2024 costs. And particularly, so into the midterm, as this is a strategic update, where you really see the levers to pull on the cost side ex the upgauge, which is clearly a big part of that midterm story. Secondly, I always like to hear from Garry, and we haven't heard from him on the stage.
So really, just a broad question of sort of where he's excited, where he's worried about market developments generally, and that would be both in the U.K. and, and also in Switzerland, which I think has launched already. And the final one, you can probably guess what I'm doing here, but you've talked about winter loss reduction, Kenton. I was wondering what sort of scale that might be able to achieve in the current financial year. Thank you.
Let's start with the one everyone wants to know about holidays. And then we'll do the big ones.
Great. Yeah, excited is not really a word I use a lot about my emotions. I think, you know, I think we're, we're hugely positive about holidays, clearly. And I think that, you know, I mean, what's been great is it's no great surprise to us that we've ended up where we're ending up, and it'll be no great surprise to us when we end at GBP 250 million, and I don't think it will be a great surprise to us, you know, when we take the number one position within the U.K. It's great to see you guys coming on the journey now to say, "Oh, yeah, I'm, I'm seeing how this plays out.
I'm seeing how that works, and believing in that." So I think that, you know, that's been a huge positive for us. In terms of looking forward to the GBP 250 million, I mean, it is a U.K. play predominantly. If we look at Birmingham, how we're doing in Birmingham, fantastically well. If we look at some of the U.K. regions, like Belfast, fantastically well. And I think, you know, that gives us the confidence that we can continue that growth very, very quickly. It also gives the airline the confidence that they can put the capacity in there, because, of course, looking at an end-to-end profitability point of view, then those routes become very attractive.
I mean, I think in terms of the kind of competitor reaction to that growth, the thing I would say we've done incredibly well is execution, is just real focus on execution and discipline as well. You know, we're not out doing river cruises and doing this product and that product. You know, we're focusing on beach, we're focusing on cities, and we're trying to make those the best that they can be. And I think that, you know, some of the competitors' reaction to that growth and ambition for them to grow is just to cast that net really wide and not do much of it particularly well.
In terms of kind of who I'd see, you know, the competitors for us are the traditional operators, you know, Jet2 and TUI, the online travel agents, and then the customers who are traveling with us still, who bought the accommodation elsewhere. I think we've got a very clear strategy for each of those. If we come to the European part, very quickly, we've launched Switzerland. The numbers in Switzerland at the moment, we are trying to build, 'cause what I didn't want to do was just take a huge amount of marketing money, dump it into Switzerland in order to get the volumes up quickly. We launched it back in July, in order that we've got kind of six months to start to organically build traffic.
When we get into turn of year, we've got quite good traffic coming in that we can then convert into holidays, and that will be the plan for the other markets that we launch. We'll test the market. We won't flood it in terms of spending an awful lot of money. And then once we see what the appetite is for holidays, then we'll absolutely focus on it. But in the short term, at the moment, the focus is on the U.K., 'cause that's where all the opportunities still lie for next year.
Thanks, Garry. So next question was on cost. I think the first thing to say is we're confident we've got a strong cost advantage in the airports that we operate from, when we look at the competitors in those airports. And clearly, we're pleased with the performance over the last six months. We guided that H2 will be flat. It actually, the CPS came down 1.3%, and that was despite quite a bit of disruption. We had the issues with the tower at Gatwick being understaffed and leading to caps, and obviously, we had the ATC challenges through the summer. So we're very pleased with the progress of cost this half.
As we go forward, we said we expect costs to continue to reduce slightly, similar quantum, when we go into Q1, and that's from the addition of capacity, which helps aircraft utilization, helps block hour productivity. I think really, we would expect it to be broadly flat by the end of H1, because we're gonna continue to build a resilient program as possible as we move into the summer. That investment, you know, we didn't get it back this year. Disruption remained stubbornly high. It moved from being crew and supplier related two years ago, and it was none of that. This time, it was all ATC and weather and the kind of condensed, compressed corridor that you can fly on because of the continuance of the war.
So we will prepare for a more difficult external environment, and therefore, that some of that preparation and investment will be there in H2, but I'd still expect H1 to be flat. I would like the whole year to be flat. As I look at our plans today, for full transparency, it's not yet, so there's still more work to be done to get it into that position. There's there is inflation coming to the system in airport costs and ground handling, from the inflation we've had, especially in the regulated airports, that will come through. It'll be the same for everyone, but that will come through. The crew productivity will increase, which will help offset some of that inflation that will be in that part.
We're also gonna carry on with the seasonal basis. The investment with opening Alicante means that that will involve seasonal crew, and we'll get the advantages that we see from that. We've got some annualization benefits from the fact that the maintenance that we're doing in the Berlin hangar , both kind of base maintenance there and line maintenance is saving us 41% a visit. We've got annualization because now we've installed Descent Profile Optimization throughout the fleet, and that is driving a 1% kind of plus benefit on fuel burn, which we're pleased to see.
We will work to reduce our disruption, and we are looking at all the possibilities from AI and data initiatives, whether that's in our contact center, whether that's the SSDM app, and greater usage for people to self-handle in times of disruption, in holidays, whether that's through content loading for hotels or destinations that can be so easily generated now. We are working on that. We'll do more at the year-end when it comes to that, but that's kind of our outlook when it comes to cost. The comment on winter losses. Thank you. I think two things to bear in mind. We've had a good start. We've put 15% capacity in for Q1. The yields are ahead. They're comfortably ahead of where they were last year, which is obviously good to see.
We're about 55% sold for that quarter, which is broadly in line with where we were last year. So load factor's flat, which means bookings are obviously up 15%, in line with capacity. But it's still early. When we look at Q2, the load factor is about 15%, so you've got an awful long way to go in Q2. The other thing I've been mindful of is, while we'll keep the cost of our cost per seat ex-fuel flat, fuel is a different story, and it is bumping around all over the place. And if you look at the year-on-year progression of fuel, our, our kind of fuel costs that we've hedged, and we've got about 73% hedged, is at $866 this year, and it was about $800 last year.
But the real killer is the dollar's hedged at 1.22, and this time last year, we had the dollar hedged at 1.29. So that means our cost per seat for fuel, if you do the math on that, is gonna come to about a 15% increase. So it's not enough that we need to cover a kind of flattish ex-fuel cost. We've got to factor in and build and recover that fuel, which is gonna be chunky for everybody. Everyone's facing the same position. I think we've got a good hedge position when I look at the other airlines. So I think we'll be slightly advantaged in that, and everyone has that. But clearly, winter's a time where it is not as easy to pass on fuel hikes as it is in summer.
And outside the natural peaks in winter, we'll still be using price, as every airline does, to stimulate the demand and build up the load factors. So a bit early to say, you know, in kind of absolute numbers, the fuel bill with the capacity growth is gonna be up GBP 270 million plus, year-on-year, and about GBP 140-150 of that is kind of the year-on-year per seat increase, and the rest will come from the capacity increase. So, you know, that's the challenge. Fuel, fuel's the challenge, but it's a good start.
Ruxandra Haradau-Döser with HSBC. First, could you please quantify the disruption costs in 2023? Second, you mentioned that city tourism is coming back. Do you expect city tourists to continue to recover over the next quarters? And do you see potential for the structure of leisure traffic to recover around the level of pre-COVID? And given your high exposure to city tourists, do you think that this will drive some outperformance over the next quarters? Third, on environmental costs, how do you think about environmental costs in terms of your in the context of your medium-term targets? Do you expect this to be passed over? What are the assumptions in terms of of staff, of CO2 certificates? And one final question, the... No, I'm fine with this. Thanks.
Okay, thank you. I mean, look, I'll just start from this. We're not gonna disclose the disruption costs that we have for this summer, but obviously, it has been challenging, you know, both in terms of the you know, the overall ATC environment that has meant congestion in the airports, and then we've had specific challenges then, as you know, in Gatwick, and you know, we've had this, you know-
Pension reform.
Yeah, exactly. There's been a number of things, you know, strikes across there as well. Never mind, the airports are closed because the car parks is on fire and, and so on and so on. There's always things that, that is happening. We'll come back in the full year on, on, on more on details on, on that disruption cost. I think in terms of the segments on what's, what's, what's coming through and what is not, you know, coming through to that extent, I mean, look, last winter, we actually saw that there was a weakness in the— into the beach and to the leisure, you know, demand.
But I think that, you know, we've seen a strong, strong pickup. It's been an extraordinary performer clearly this summer, and that's what we're continuing to see. And I think it just comes back to the fact that it's starting to be evidently clear that what people have said in the surveys, that they, they look, they will prioritize their holidays. They, they will prioritize that, that beach thing. That is continuing, you know, going also into, to this winter. We saw that there was a slower, you know, pickup of city-to-city travel. That was partly driven by, by the business, but I think that the stats we have, Thomas, is now demonstrating that, you know, business travel is almost back to where it was prior to 2019 for us now.
Actually, if you're looking, as I said, and Sophie can confirm this as well, we're looking at the day-to-day trading, you know, it is, you know, one of the strongest performance we see. It's also one of the things that actually books late into the departures. That's why it's still, you know, challenging to make a clear case on where the winter's gonna end up in. But on a day-to-day basis, then it's a chunky part of the network is doing really well. I think that the domestic is where we see that, you know, we have certain parts of the area, where we have, you know, a good performance. But we also see that there are challenges across the network on the growth that we have built up and others have built up as well.
But on the other hand, we're also seeing that there is a relief in the capacities, you know, from a competitive point of view in a number of cases where this exists. So we have the flexibility to be able to adapt that and adjust the program towards that. I don't think that there's necessarily any trend we're seeing that think that people are suddenly gonna not wanting to go on the holiday, on the leisure. I think that's really gonna stay for the foreseeable future. And of course, we're in an advantage position overall in all segments, that we know that people are gravitating towards value and trusting in the brand. That works for us.
In terms of the environmental cost as well, look, there are so many numbers out there where people are predicting that, you know, the transition towards, you know, the— that would be included in each and everyone's roadmap to net zero is gonna be $1 billion this and $1 billion that. The true answer is that nobody knows. Nobody knows, because there are counterarguments also to say that while there are big R&D costs and while you're moving into some of these technologies, whether that is SAS, whether that is green hydrogen, as an example, you know, the scale that will be evidently there, ultimately, I believe, and a lot of other people also believe, that this is actually gonna mean that there's no big certainty that actually those zero-emission technology will be more costly than the existing technology that we have.
And remind you also that, you know, the new fleet order, where we're transferring all the CEOs out into the NEOs, NEOs, will also have a big effect and do that. The greater concern about the cost of this is the taxation, where governments and decision-makers, you know, in the kind of view that, you know, that this is somehow what the public and the constituents want, is to be able to control the carbon emissions from the industry. They will dampen demand by putting on taxes that reduces the same thing. There is zero evidence that that works. Zero evidence that that works. What will happen is that you will have the same number of flights, worse load factor, and it will just be more rich and privileged people on those planes.
And when you have that discussion, which I have every week with ministers across Europe, they realize that this is a logistics agenda, and that won't stand up to the public scrutiny when that becomes apparent to them, that this is just gonna go back to be something that only rich and wealthy people can afford to do, like before the decentralization. So we are arguing very much for so that the cost of the transition should be neutral, and we can see that there are cases where you can get there, but you would need to be implemented and to get volumes from some of these technologies. And I feel more confident about that rather than, you know, politicians' enthusiasm for increasing taxes.
Morning. It's Harry Gowers from JP Morgan. Got three questions, if I can. First one on, on the midterm targets. So obviously, yields may be peaking currently, so I hesitate to ask a long-term yields question. I see you factor in a little bit in terms of the other bucket on that waterfall chart. But maybe what are you factoring in for yields longer term? Roughly, they stay flat or constant versus where they are now, or maybe coming down a bit. And then on the, on the fleet and the GBP 3 per seat upgauging, is that- do you have some, like, in terms of the flexibility in the fleet, does that GBP 3 rely on a certain mix of deliveries, or is, or is that based on your, your base fleet forecast, which you put on that slide as well?
Then the third one, maybe back to Garry, if I can, just on holidays, favorite topic: Where are the margins maybe going midterm? So given the business model, can they incrementally grow from here or not? Thanks.
Yeah. I mean, I can do a little bit on the yield. It's interesting when you're looking through the yield itself for the summer. You know, the increase we've seen on average in the fare for this summer on yield versus last summer is GBP 9. It's basically two cups of, you know, coffees here on the high street. I think it's important to understand that when we're talking about the percentages increases that we're seeing in yield, this is still, you know, within reach for most people to be able to fly, and as such, also, we believe, going forward because of the actions that we're taking. I think it will be a continued pattern that you will see strong demand into the peaks.
Obviously, that will be reflected into the yields. I think that there will be continued stimulation that would be needed in the shoulders and the off-peak, which has just been the same thing that we've seen before. I think that the booking pattern is such now that you are getting an earlier booking pattern than probably before, and it started really into this summer. That's what is continuing to be the case here for the winter. But there also will be cases that outside the shoulders and the peaks, that you will have to stimulate the market in the lows, that you will be softest in the lows. So it switched from being a very, very late market. Last, if you remember that last quarter, last year's Q4 was an exceptionally strong late market.
It's an exceptionally strong late market in Q4 last year. But still, we managed to deliver them, you know, an RPS increase of over 9% into this year. So I still think that this is something that will continue, and, you know, this is one of the most important things that people will prioritize, and I think it will continue to evolve in that way. But we're always gonna be able to offer immense value for what we do.
Yeah, to pick that up, I mean, we didn't build the kind of medium-term targets on the back of revenue, as you can see. Our winter losses are GBP 400 million. Now, with fuel going up 15%, this isn't the easiest winter to kick that down quickly, but I, you know, I have no doubt we can re-- we can, we can halve those. Yeah, you know, we've got ambitions to do better than that, but you can see that over time, certainly over this time period, that's something that you can, you can, you can significantly reduce with productivity gains in pilot, crew, with some network enhancements for a winter or shoulder program, more VFR routes, et cetera. Not saying it relies on us charging ex- pounds more.
easyJet holidays is more about the attachment to easyJet Airlines seat. Going from 5% to 10% market share, it would still not be near the Jet2s and the TUIs that are up at kind of 16%, 17%, 18% market share, is moving, but will move quickly. The last one, the upgauging, to pick up on your question, with the 35 conversions granted yesterday, and agreed and signed up to yesterday, it's a kind of greater than GBP 3. It's quite factual. We start the upgrading, upgauging journey next year.
I think about 13 of the, you know, well, 13 of the 319s will go back, and 16 new NEOs will come in, and that will start the, the kind of mixing of the fleet. The, the fuel is just factual. When you fly other things, that's what happens. The seat up, upgauging just has that impact 'cause there are no more pilots, so you, as, as long as you're capable of filling the, the slightly larger planes, that, that will come through. I don't think we have any concerns. The A321 mix, we only have 5% A321s in our fleet today. With this upgauging of 35, that takes that to just over 20% in 2028, and we have plenty of thick routes and slot-constrained airports that, that we, we can, we can use those on.
As you journey to 34, that 20% gets to about 40% of the fleet. It's a disciplined, controlled increase in those thirty-ones, so that we're more— we're confident about that, that cost element, and we're not kind of betting the farm on, on big yield increases. There are other things, you know, we do want to enhance the network. We can see that we can get that in-flight retail up. We've had a big jump, kind of this year, and we still know that, that, that we see more we can do on availability of product lines, on enhancing things, on working on margins. That's something we'll, we'll continue to do. It's mainly based on cost.
Do you have anything to add, Garry?
Yeah, just on the holidays piece. I mean, the margins are very, very high for a holidays company. If you look at the kind of top ten players and the margins that they're producing, and then you look at our margins, I mean, we are way, way, way above any of them. But there is no reason for us to believe that there'll be any kind of deterioration on those. I mean, if we look at how we modeled those medium terms, it was on the assumption that those margins would maintain. And if you think, where do we get the margins from? It's the, you know, the cost that we've got coming in. We work on a cost-plus basis, and we are the lowest cost versus any of our competitors.
So our ability to be able to react to them, we have. As we become better known, and we've got, you know, like, a 82% repeat intent from the customers coming with us. So every month, we're becoming better known within the market, and that will just mean that we will get more and more traffic coming in from easyJet.com, and coming organically to us, that we don't need to go out and pay for. And in terms of, you know, the targeting of growth in specific areas, you know, we may do that tactically, but for the overall, I don't think that will do anything to bring the margins down. So we are aiming that we will maintain those margins during that period, and that's what we've modeled that GBP 250 million on.
Hi, James Goodall from Redburn Atlantic. Just coming back to Garry on the holidays targets. In terms of reaching that 10% market share, who are you expecting to take that market share from? And just to clarify, the 250 million, is that including or excluding your ambitions to go into other markets outside of the U.K.? Secondly, just thinking about sort of the booking environment. Obviously, we've seen load factors in terms of the guide, sort of pull back a little bit to flat rather than up. I guess, you know, have you seen any changes in terms of sort of current booking patterns? Have they pulled back slightly? Obviously, there's a lot of fears around the macro at the moment. And then finally, just thinking about shareholder returns.
I mean, we now have a dividend back, but I'm just wondering about your thinking about buybacks versus dividends. You obviously issued a lot of shares during COVID. I'm just wondering, why not buy those ones back? Cheers.
On that, the GBP 250 million, yes, we put a number in for the other source markets, but I think that what I don't wanna do, I mean, I wanna maintain that discipline of the focus of the team. I don't wanna flood Switzerland or any other markets that we would launch with unnecessary overhead or take the attention of the team off the U.K. to put onto that at this point, because I think there is a huge opportunity. If we look at just Birmingham in terms of how we're doing there, it's phenomenally well, just on the launch of that. There is an awful lot of headroom within the U.K., and therefore, you know, would we be reliant on those other source markets to get to the GBP 250 million?
No, we wouldn't be. I think that can easily come from the U.K., but we have those as well, that we can, you know, kind of hedge our bets on, if you like. Was there another question on holidays, or was that- Ah, who we take market share from? Yeah, so those three big buckets of, the kind of traditional players, the OTAs and the customers who are doing it themselves, we are seeing a lot of growth from customers who are doing it themselves, buying a flight from easyJet and buying accommodation elsewhere. And really, for them, it's a case of can they do it with us cheaper, and can we deliver to their expectations?
Actually, you know, we've got an 83% CSAT there, where customers are saying, "Well, dealing with you, everything's in one place. I'm getting it cheaper than if I was to buy the flight and buy the accommodation separately, and I don't have any of the kind of traditional package elements offered that would put me off." So they're quite happy with that, and they see that very much as a value play. I think in terms of the traditional tour operators, you know, the second biggest player now, TUI, I don't believe that they're growing their aircraft, and they will probably increase their capacities by flying more on our aircraft.
Now, if the customer is buying exactly the same flight and going to exactly the same hotel, but paying GBP 200 and GBP 300 more than they pay with us, then that's not a particularly sustainable model for them. And I think there's a great opportunity for us to speak to customers who are traveling on our aircraft, talk to them about easyJet holidays, and get them to consider coming with us the next time they come. And I think with the OTAs, you know, we're just able to compete better with the OTAs 'cause we don't have those costs of acquisition. We don't have to go out and spend millions and millions of GBP on PPC in order to get customers to our website.
So we can always do better on them in terms of pricing and margin, and I think that when you look at how they're now trying to go into more traditional marketing to build that brand, because it's just unsustainable, the millions that they're spending on PPC, I think that will slow down their growth. We'll take share there.
Just to add to that, and I come on to the yield question, and then you can do the dividend versus buyback. I think it's, you know, one of the things that is actually contributing towards the airline is the confidence that, you know, Sophie and we will have then in adding on capacity into certain routes, when we kind of know what the demand the holiday business can represent on that, which is really good. It's a different booking pattern because it books even earlier than others, which is really good for the cash flow as well. And holidays are basically paying the same price as the customer for the seat. So there's no cannibalization on that as well. On the yield, I think it is that pattern that I just mentioned.
I think it is we're seeing a stronger, earlier pattern, and then I think when you come into the, you know, shoulder periods as well, you're gonna still need to do some stimulation. We guided towards, you know, 10% RPS in this quarter. We ended up with just over 9. I mean, it's decimals, you know, 9.3, something like that. So it's in the rounding, and I think that's just something that we will continue to see. But, you know, we have 15% more capacity, 15% more booking for this quarter in there and, you know, comfortably ahead on the yield.
And then we're just gonna make sure that we continue to, you know, get the most out of it we can, where the demand is the best, and obviously then make sure that we're getting the load factors also in the shoulders.
The short answer is we're open to all types of shareholder returns. So we did... We kind of had a little debate about which would be the most effective for this one, but it was more a question of 10% sign of confidence. We're restarting the dividends, but we're equally, you know, we'll look at both. Share buybacks are a possibility.
Morning, it's Jamie Rowbotham from Deutsche Bank. Thanks for the presentation. I've got 3 questions that mainly pertain to slide 5, the one with the PBT per seat bridge. It might be splitting hairs, but I think you're gonna do GBP 5 this year on that metric, and you say that upgauging brings GBP 3 or more. So I'd have thought that alone gets you into your GBP 7-GBP 10 range, whereas it looks from the slide as though a couple of other things need to come through to hit the range, like holidays and lower winter losses. So feel free to tell me I've misread it. Second question: Other initiatives on that slide is quite a big block, and within the detail, cost discipline is it stands out to me.
You know, it's eight years since easyJet was doing a PBT per seat in the GBP 7-£10 range, and I'm just interested to know what's gonna happen on cost discipline in the next three to five years to make a difference. Finally, would you say that it's maybe a back-end loaded target? Because, you know, if we envisage what that waterfall might look like in fiscal 2024, I can envisage some holidays improvement, I can envisage some benefit from upgauging, but when I hear you talking about cost per seat, ex fuel, flat at best, clearly you've got some non-fuel, and then you mentioned it, fuel cost inflation that's going to potentially make things quite a challenge to improve, I'd have thought, PBT per seat in fiscal 2024. Maybe you could give us some thoughts on the phasing.
Thanks.
Yeah, yeah. Can I just make some comments on that as well, and then, and-
Yeah.
You can fill in as well? I think that, look, you know, there, of course, there will be, you know, inflation and cost pressures that's coming over and above what we have in here. So, you know, that, that GBP 3, that is definitely there. That's an advantage that if you compare to other airlines, we don't see anybody else have that. So that's a, that's just almost a tick in the box as it is, you know, bound to be happening in terms of the upgauging. The winter losses are real. Look, it's GBP 411 million that we're comparing ourselves to. You're absolutely right to point out there's been one year where the company has been making money in the winter. It was a few million GBP than going back to the, to, to dates where, where you set out.
But, you know, if you're looking at the changes we've done from the revenue capabilities and the ancillaries that the company didn't have before, that hasn't been anywhere near materialized when we haven't put capacity back into the system. So it basically takes us, you know, less yield pressure in order for us to make that happen, that we actually didn't have before. We're gonna spend more time on the full year presentation, talk more about data and AI, what that is gonna do in terms of us for, you know, enhancing the algorithms. You know, today, we are still limited in terms of the way we're doing the profiles and the algorithms of taking external data sources in competitive pricing their capacity in order to get the best total, you know, contribution from a seat.
Where do you prioritize load factor with the benefit you have ancillaries versus the yield? Where do you let your load factor curve be? And, you know, we're talking pounds here. It's not like we're gonna need to have GBP 50, GBP 60 to do that. And what, what AI is doing and what data is doing for us is, is, is tremendous in, in that aspect, which is there to partly mitigate some of—you're right to point it out. There will be other cost pressures coming through. The holidays, I think we've gone into now quite a lot of depth on as well, to say that, look, you know, what is it gonna take for this not to happen? Because most of these things do sit in our, our control.
And we just know that the cost base of other will increasingly go up, and it will be helpful not only for the group contribution, but also then in terms of the profits in itself of that. So, and in terms of the backend where this comes from, I don't believe so, because if you're looking at the things that we already have in pipeline that is coming through now, and as we're now getting capacity back into the system, that will be, you know, quite significant as we go forward, also in the next few years.
Yeah. I mean, the way the chart works is, you know, you can— you do get past GBP 10 with the three red blocks, but then you're saying to yourself: Well, we're also growing at that stage, so there's some, there's some reinvestment. Are you best going... You know, do you want to get GBP 12 per seat, per seat margins? I think Ryanair were looking to stay in that kind of EUR 8-EUR 10 per seat range. Do you want to go there, or do you want to reinvest and have that in growth? I think there's, you know, there's two ways to look at that, but the good news is, as we said before, they're largely, they're not revenue-dependent blocks.
In terms of the cost discipline, I think the opportunity for us is to get productivity back in easyJet. You saw that we increased it 15% this year, but we've got a utilization of 9.1. It won't surprise you to know that we have excellent utilization, actually, when you look at the summer, and it's a lack of utilization in the winter, and therefore, to start restoring this capacity, if we can get another 10% utilization in the winter side, the summer's already pretty strong when it comes to utilization, and that's the opportunity. That utilization then follows on with pilot productivity, it follows on with crew productivity.
You'll see that we're not so ambitious with crew productivity this winter, and that's because we're very mindful of delivering a kind of stable, resilient operation. We know that investment in crew will pay back fivefold if we can get it right from setting ourselves up for the more difficult external environment that there is. I think that's the kind of discipline we'll look at, but everything is being looked at. We're insourcing more maintenance, whether that's line maintenance, whether that's base maintenance. We'll look at other things there, where obviously, as every airline in active negotiations with the unions, we've completed a lot of them during the kind of hyper-high inflationary periods, and some of that's in our cost base now.
But we'll be completing the next round of naturally this year and the next year as we continue on that journey, and look to kind of fairly reward our staff, but make sure that we're driving productivity from the crew.
Hey, yeah, I have a couple of questions on the industry. Stephen Furlong from Davy. For you, and maybe Kenton, if you wanna chip in. Just want your view, Johan. There's a post-COVID, a lot of deals out there in terms of consolidation with the network airlines, even TAP now will be in SAS and the other ones that are being executed. Your view on that, and would we ever see any consolidation on the low-cost front as well? Because, let's say there's a lot of orders out there and gauge increases, and is, you know, when you add in Wizz, Ryanair, or Jet2 and others, is there enough room for everyone as you go? Second question on kind of slots, London, any worries about competitive encroachment? I know obviously, market share gains at Gatwick.
Some of it was maybe lease the slots from BA, I think. So I just was wondering what you thought there. And finally, maybe it's- Kenton, on the Airbus deal and the supply chain, did they give you any kind of comfort that they'd actually deliver on the schedule? Because that would impact the GBP 3 per seat, because just an industry problem, it's all moving to the right, and say, the A321s take later and later than you'd expect. And I'm just wondering what - how those discussions went. Thank you.
Yeah. I think on the M&A, do you want to talk a little bit, perhaps, about the London market, Sophie, as well, and what we see there? And look, you know, you take the Air France KLM and the SAS transaction. I'm struggling to see where the consolidation is. There was no overlapping routes in there, as far as I can tell. So I can see that there are, you know, airlines out there who have been in, you know, financially very, very distressed positions. And I'm sure when they have done their work internally, they can work out the way on how actually this is gonna deliver a better result or role for the group.
But there's got to be other changes than actually, you know, consolidation, than the fact that, you know, the company couldn't have done that themselves. So then you have the TAP, and I think it's a different position, but it with similar characteristics of it. It's a struggling and challenging airline that, you know, is looking likely to be picked up by one of the other full-service carriers. Which is absolutely fine. That's perfect for us. We love competing with full service and inefficient legacy airlines, and if they become bigger, the better. So that's fine. I don't think that there is a genuine roadmap for any, you know, consolidations among the low-cost airlines. Look, I think Ryanair is very disciplined on their strategy, on where the growth is and where they're chasing.
We don't see any big entrenchment into the Western Hemisphere in any big way. And so if we can talk to you a little bit about the capacities and the volumes that we've seen that's been overlapping, that is not that significant compared to the overall growth. We're seeing that Wizz is moving out a number of our markets, Italy being one, and we're seeing that they're moving more towards the eastern side, Saudi Arabia, and then just other places. So, and I think that there is merit in each and every one of those, you know, propositions. I think we're very clear, which we demonstrate today, about it is, you know, the core is the primary airport here in the kind of Western Hemisphere.
We can still look at further markets to do a seasonal basis in operating, you know, in from North Africa, as an example, into the big capital cities in Europe, would be one that gives you lower cost base, gives you more flexibility, as an example. But the beauty is that we have the positions on the slots in both ways. So even if we're seeing, you know, competition coming in from one low-cost airlines into one base, they don't have the equivalent slot positions at the primary airports at the other base. And that's why this is so, you know, this strategy is so beautiful for that.
I think that they're, you know, the low-cost airlines, they feel, and I'm thinking about ourselves and Ryanair and Wizz, I think that, you know, they've looked to be, and certainly we are very confident about the, about their own, you know, their own strategy. In terms of what the full-service carriers, I think that they are the ones who's kind of driving this so-called consolidation. Like I said, I'm really struggling to see where that, where that is gonna do for them. If you're a loss-making airline, and your question is whether you're gonna, you know, lose hundreds of millions or losing tens of millions, I can't see that those improvements have taken place in a number of these companies over the period.
London strategy, do you want to talk a little bit in competition? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, sure. So, from a London capacity perspective, pre-COVID, BA at Gatwick had 32 aircraft. They reduced that to 16 aircraft during the pandemic. We picked up 8 aircraft worth of flying, on those slots, and we believe the other remaining 8 went to Vueling within the IAG group. On those 8, that was a 5-year term, and next year's the first year we start to return those slots. So three aircraft worth of slots will go back. So we will be... At the moment, we're at 81 aircraft in Gatwick. By the end of the term, we'll be at 73 aircraft in Gatwick, BA will be at 32. So we'll still have, you know, significant scale, and it's just three aircraft that are going back next year.
In terms of broader competitor capacity, what we've seen, actually, that's interesting is, for the summer, when we looked at the summer capacity, Ryanair and Wizz added significant capacity overall, but actually net was only 700,000 seats on our network of 56 million seats. So where they're growing is definitely not on the routes for the reasons that Johan said. You've got to be able to get slots in both ends of the route. So, yes, they're growing quite aggressively, but not on our network. So, interestingly, we've even seen from the fourth of September, actually, Wizz have now withdrawn all of the domestic head-to-heads with us in Italy from Malpensa. That's 17 routes in total that they've now dropped, not just domestics, but others, that were head-to-head with us, in Malpensa.
So actually, we're seeing retrenchment on a lot of the capacity that they'd grown onto. We'd held our position on those because we know they're successful, and now they've reduced that capacity. So we're not seeing any big pockets of growth, really, on our network from any of the competitors either, really.
Okay. On kind of aircraft number, I mean, ironically, you know, there has definitely been a squeeze. You can see the trouble that both OEMs have meeting their production targets. You'd have read Ryanair, we're due to get 27 MAX aircraft in what is our Q1. They're gonna get 14, so that's quite a drop. They're hoping that Boeing will catch that up, but their production capable is at the moment. Let's see how they do. And obviously, those airlines that are using Pratt & Whitney engine,
Pratt & Whitney engines are having to take those off for inspections, so that will take some metal out of the fleet. What I'd say is we, we had up on our chart that we were expecting to get, well, originally 7 aircraft in 2023, it became 8. We had 10 delivered, so Airbus is very keen to look after us as their number one customer in Europe. We did have, last time we talked about having 8 in 2023, and I think 18 in 2024, so 26. We're gonna get those 26. We just got 10 this year. They accelerated the delivery of 2, and we'll get 16 next year. Everything that we were looking for for the next 2 years, we're getting.
After that, the numbers in the fleet chart reflect the conversations with Airbus. So I expect that to go to about 19 aircraft now in 2025, which is what the charts are anticipating. And then we'll see how long this supply constraint lasts, but you know, at the moment, will it last into 2026? Maybe. In which case, we may see some movements to the right in 2026. But we also, when we look at our fleet, have more green time in our in some of the older aircraft, or well, make basically most of our CEO fleet, because we didn't operate them that hard during the pandemic, and therefore, we have a season, 2 seasons of green time.
That means they could extend from 18 to 19 years, which will bridge any small gaps that we have in the delivery. So pretty comfortable with the fleet plan.
Morning, and Neil Glynn from AIR Control Tower Research. Two questions, please. The first one, you've ticked all the boxes, as far as I can tell, with respect to the medium-term strategy, apart from free cash flow. And obviously, as you start to distribute cash to shareholders, it becomes increasingly important. So given the CapEx plans that you've already published for FY 2024-2026, which are quite meaty, how confident are you that you'll be able to generate free cash flow over that period? And then the second question: upgauging is, it's obviously not a new part of the strategy. You've been doing it for quite a long time. I checked the Investor Day 2014 just earlier, and it was included in the 2014 Investor Day slides.
So I'm just interested, your experience of the benefits of upgauging over the past X amount of years, has there been much of a variation on an aircraft basis as you look across the network in terms of aircraft A has produced a positive impact by upgauging on a line of flying, whereas aircraft B has been not so successful? Or what has been the key driver in terms of perhaps mixed benefits from upgauging so far?
So, let me do the upgauging and-
Yeah.
-do the other one as well. Look, I think it's a very remarkable, you know, big difference from 2014, where we are today. It's the positions on the constrained airports are driving higher than above the returns or the network average. That wasn't really the same. That was more of a fact that you had more capacity available in a number of markets where we and others were competing as well. What we're seeing right now is that when we're, you know, moving into that upgauging, where we don't need more slots to grow the capacity, which upgauging essentially means, you know, it will take, you know, a short period of time before that matures, and then that is the market price that you can compete on.
That is proven time and time again here, where we've seen this in the last few years. That's a benefit because of what the constrained airport does to the yield. That really wasn't there in the early part of the upgauging.
Okay. From a cash flow, you can see from the medium-term targets, we've put a little sub, sub-line about high teen EBITDAR margin delivery. I think when you look at a high teen EBITDAR margin, the turnover was GBP 8.2 billion that we just did. If that starts moving to GBP 9 billion-GBP 10 billion, then that's the kind of quantum that we want to take our EBITDAR delivery to. If I look at where our, you know, we're now in a position, we've done a lot of deleveraging, and we've got a kind of neutral, no net debt. Net cash was something like GBP 40 million, so pretty much sat there with no net debt at the moment.
We've got a bond that we'll repay out of cash for GBP 500 million in October. And then after that, it's not till June 2025 that the next bond is, and then after that, we have one left in January 2028 that needs repaying. Because we've paid back the borrowing on the UKEF, none of the aircraft in ownership are encumbered, and the liquidity stands at GBP 4.7 billion left versus against a requirement of GBP 2 billion. So yes, we'll take the aircraft deliveries in 2024 from a cash position and operations position, which will take that liquidity down a little bit, but it's still comfortably above. But it'll push our 74% ownership on the way to 80% ownership.
I think there's then no debt to pay back the following year in 2024, which allows some more balance sheet strengthening. And then what we'll look to do is, when is the timing right to reenter the bond market? We've been very fortunate that we've been able to pay bonds back at a time and not go back into the market with the interest rates where they've been. But let's have a look at the time to go back into the bond market. And then, as we get the ownership of those NEOs into the 80s, with our kind of long, long-term target of kind of having 75% ownership of, of that class, we'll also then look at the, the relative economics of sale, lease back, JOLCOs, which can be attractive.
But all the meantime, we're paying the PDPs for those deliveries in the, in the running cash flow and the running CapEx, which means when you take a delivery, there's 80% left to pay, but 100% potential funding if you choose to do an SLB. So very much that, and then, and then, you know, from the ownership that we have in the CEOs, where we've got over 100 of the 320s owned, we've still got 20-odd of the 319s.
We'll carry on as they age, managing those for value, so dripping in $100 million-$200 million per annum from that program of managing value, which will have no impact on the P&L, but just release a bit of cash as from that book, which will, because the numbers we talked about for CapEx are the gross CapEx numbers. So obviously, anything we do, either with the CEO fleet or with a little bit of sale and lease back in JOLCO on the NEO fleet, will drop that down. But plan A is to get that EBITDA up, so.
Muneeba Kayani from Bank of America. So, first question on the near term, actually, for the winter losses, can you help us understand if you're saying costs will be flat for H1, fuel likely higher, so how are winter losses down? Like, what are your expectation on pricing then? Is just one first clarification on near term. Secondly, question on holidays again. As you get bigger, do you think you'll still be able to source inventory the same as you've been now? Like, what are the challenges there, if any? And then just kind of going, following on, on the question on free cash flow, can you talk about what your net debt to EBITDA targets are in the medium term?
And just to clarify on owned, so would the new deliveries be, should we assume, are likely all owned, on the NEOs, or you're still figuring that out?
Sorry, I missed that last one.
Just the new deliveries, what's the financing on that? Should we expect them to be funded with cash and owned, or would you look to lease them? Thank you.
All right. Kick off with the winter, I think we said the position there. We expect the cost ex fuel to be flat over the half. Q2 is 15% sold, so long way to go. The prices we've got so far are encouraging, but fuel can be about 15% up, so we'll need better than flat pricing, and we have better than flat pricing. We need better than flat pricing to kind of hold that level. Now, we've had a good start. The network's performing well, with 85% of Q2 still to book, some way to go. We, you know, we'll update more when we sit here again in November, when we do the year end. That's the position where we are today.
When it comes to net debt, EBITDA, we're not giving out targets. The capital allocation framework shows that we, we want to have a strong investment-grade balance sheet, and we'll work with the agencies on the, on the appropriate metrics. Right now, we have no net debt, so that wouldn't be a ratio. We're, you know, we're comfortable that we want to drive the EBITDA performance and, and see where it is. The NEO ownership, 74%. We intend to take the 16 aircraft that deliver next year into ownership without financing them, just from our running operations now. We may choose to do a bond if the market proves right next year, but we'll look at, we'll look at the timing of that to go back into the market.
But it's not from immediate liquidity needs, but, you know, if timing presents, then that might be the right time to do that. And as I said before, with those NEO aircraft, as they start delivering, you have the very attractive aircraft when it comes to the lessor market. So you'll get very much oversubscribed if you go to the market to look to finance those aircraft. But right now, we're just strengthening the balance sheet and bringing them into ownership. Inventory.
Yeah, on inventory, we're in a really, really strong position, I think, with inventory. I mean, I think from a kind of distribution perspective, when Thomas Cook went bust, there were a lot of hotels got their fingers burnt, and they said, "You know, we need to ensure that we've got width and distribution. We cannot be going in and relying just on one big partner going forward," and we came along. So we kind of helped that narrative for them. And we're also producing. I think that's the thing, you know, they look at the amount of rooms that we take, they look at the amount of rooms that we fill, and we're very consistently filling the rooms that we take for them.
And one of the reasons that, that we're so important to them going forward is that we fly much longer seasons than some of the traditional tour operators. So we start Greece earlier, we finish Greece later, we fly through the winter to places like Turkey, when no one else does. We fly through the winter to Cyprus, when no one else does. So they see that opportunity with us, that it might be small, but it really helps them in terms of kind of what to do with their winter, their winter costs. So, so that really helps as well. And, and, you know, we don't see any slowdown.
I mean, I think that I've just come back from Cyprus myself, and there's a real buzz in the beach destinations, particularly, where they're saying, "You've got to get on side with these guys 'cause they're growing like billion. And if you're not working with them, then you want to." So we're bringing on about another 500 direct hotels, and that's partners that wanna work with us, for next year. And, you know, we're getting no difficulty accessing any beds at all, and I don't think that will slow down as long as we continue to produce.
Did you say billio?
Hey, Nadine from Goldman Sachs. I have a few. Some of them are picking up on points other people made. So first, just on the unit costs. We spoke a lot about kind of all the levers, but if we just think midterm, from that GBP 54 that you're at this year, what are you budgeting in terms of your midterm target, or what would you see that going to? Is it kind of the GBP 50 level or even below that, when you think about achieving that GBP 7-GBP 10? And then just on your fleet, someone spoke about the CapEx plan, so I assume that that's still at that GBP 1.5-GBP 1.8 over the next few years. But then, if we look beyond that with the new orders, roughly what CapEx level per annum would you expect?
And then the final one, just one of the other elements in the other bucket is the ancillaries, and you've spoken a bit about that. But GBP 26 is a pretty good level. What do you see that going to? Could it hit GBP 30 per seat, or, you know, where would the midterm level potentially be?
Yeah. So you'll do that, and then, Sophie, why don't you talk about the ancillaries as well?
Okay. On the CapEx side, we'll update more at the in November. But, yeah, the last time we updated, I think it was about GBP 1.5 million for next year. Now, we were gonna take 18 new aircraft. We've taken 2 inside of this year, so that could come down a little bit, and then it goes GBP 17 million, GBP 11 million, GBP 18 million, I think. So we'll update that in the light of where we are with this proposed order book. I kind of missed the first question before ancillary. Sorry, what's the first question?
The first one was, also, you look for your app.
Yes. We'll update it. It was, it was two. Yeah.
The second one-
The cost.
On unit.
Oh, unit cost, the GBP 54. Yeah.
GBP 50, would be a fair level mid-term, or is that more ambitious or not too ambitious?
Well, I think, I mean, one of the things you got to bear in mind with where the GBP 55 that we're at today is, that is also reflective of the reorganization we've done through the network, and that's how we've managed to get the record summer we have, which is at the bottom line after those costs. I think that GBP 55 cost that's afforded the most profitable summer this company's ever had feels like about the right place, 'cause it's baked on where we have our current network, the ground handling, the airport fees, the current cost of crew. Now, I would see, really, our goal is to kind of hold that flat while others increase. We, you know, coming down in H2, 1.3%. Let's see, but I don't think others are coming down in cost.
So holding flat will be narrowing all gaps, in my opinion, and I think that's where we need to be. And what you've got to remember, if you're holding your cost flat, others are incrementing 2, 3, 4%, it's likely that that will feed the RPS environment we are operating in, although that's not part of what we're betting the farm on. But, you know, if you can hold flat and there's an RPS, and there's any positive RPS environment, then that's gonna generate improved results as you go through the year, regardless of what you're doing with holidays, regardless of what's happening elsewhere in the P&L.
And then from an ancillary pricing, you know, we're, we're not outlining what those medium-term numbers are at the moment, but we have talked about in-flight retail, it getting to GBP 1 a seat from where we are today. There are lots of opportunities, I think, to further optimize what we're doing with ancillaries without having to introduce lots of different ancillaries. So a couple of examples. One is within baggage. So at the moment, as Johan said earlier, we're one of the few airlines that has dynamic pricing on hold bags and cabin bags, which essentially says you, you're pricing from days to go and load factor build. What we're just starting to do now is a trial on having those two elements of cabin bag and hold bag talk to each other.
So at the moment, they're dynamically priced, but independently dynamically priced, and actually having an interrelationship between those. So we think that will help us squeeze an incremental benefit out of, out of baggage, for example. And then on seats, again, at the moment, we have dynamic pricing on seats, but actually, we only have five seat bands. So if anyone's familiar with our aircraft, we have the kind of upfront seats, we have the front row upfront seats, and then we have standard front half of the cabin, we have overwing, and then we have standard second half of the cabin. That's five kind of bands of seats that are all dynamically priced independently. Now, what we want to get to is, you know, ultimately, you could have 186 different price points.
You could price each seat independently. Now, that's overcomplex, and we're not gonna go there, but even moving away from this kind of system limitations we've got today on five seat bands to be able to look at more granular level seat pricing, I think will give us further upside as well. So I think there's some optimization that we can do. There's some more work we're doing on the algorithms in terms of the different price components talking to each other. And we know that talking to other revenue management systems in the world, no one else is there yet either. And actually, they have a roadmap to get to where we are today, never mind where we want to head to.
I think all of those will give us ancillary upside without then necessarily having to go out and start, you know, selling crazy things that actually don't make sense and distract the business.
Well, Mike, this is the last one.
Satish from Citigroup. Two questions from me. If you look at the Q2, you're saying 15% load factor of the bookings. Can you just share color around the different segments like beach, city, and ski destinations, how the load factors looks like, across those categories? And then just to follow up on the ancillaries, if I look at the margin drop-through, it's around 28% now, compared to, say, 23% previously. Where do you expect in the medium term that to normalize in terms of margin drop-through? Thank you.
Yeah, so Sophie, it's all yours. All the questions for you.
Yeah. So, on in-flight retail, I think there is more opportunity to have better penetration overall, in terms of where we are on there, because, at the moment, in-flight retail performs really well in the U.K.. And we're, you know, I think there's a lot more we can do in terms of optimization of range for the EU, the EU fleet, and also where we're getting to in terms of, wastage levels and all the rest of it, and optimizing that. So I think there is, there's more to be had to gain there, definitely, in terms of just what we're saying today and being smarter. Obviously, those increases are already pretty impressive, and things like duty-free now on the EU fleet is definitely helping in terms of conversion as well.
The first question, sorry, remind me, was?
The split between the-
Oh, the split between the route types. I don't have the details to hand here, but actually, all are kind of selling in line. So it wouldn't surprise you that of that 15%, the majority will be beach leisure. In terms of city and domestic, that's a much later booking profile anyway. We're not seeing any of them kind of selling out of kilter of what you would normally see in the normal booking profile. So the majority of domestics will book within 28 days, with the peak being 14 days out. So you don't have any visibility of that right now, but that's not a concern because that's a normal booking.
I think the key thing really is, we're now seeing booking trends going back to what we were seeing much more in the pre-pandemic window in terms of that lead time. So the majority of what we're selling now for Q2 will be beach and ski.
Listen, with that as well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and see us here today as well. And I hope that you have had a good sense about, you know, what we've been doing, where we stand today, and also the opportunities for the future. And please stay on here if you want to speak to myself or anyone, my colleagues as well. So thanks so much for coming. Thank you.