Jet2.com: Europe's most seasonal airline. Owner Dart Group's profit falls as winter weighs on result

Jet2.com's schedule is the most summer biased of any significant airline or airline group in Europe, with a considerable gap between it and the airlines of the tour operator groups Thomas Cook Group and TUI Group. This seasonality reflects Jet2.com's strong leisure focus and the LCC's growing dependence for seat sales on its own in-house tour operator, Jet2holidays, which provided it with almost half its passengers in the year to Mar-2017.

Attempts to reduce seasonality by growing its seat capacity in fiscal 2H (mainly winter months: Oct-2016 to Mar-2017) at a faster rate than the summer-focused 1H have only partly rebalanced the capacity distribution across the year, but barely changed the revenue distribution. This is because Jet2.com's 2H yield suffered a heavy fall as a result of rapid capacity growth.

This yield pressure, and the costs associated with establishing new bases for summer 2017 at London Stansted and Birmingham, contributed to a wider 2H loss in FY2017 for Dart Group, the owner of both Jet2.com and Jet2holidays. In spite of higher 1H profit, this led to a lower result for the financial year.

Package holidays provide strong advance sales, but the high seasonality inherent in Jet2.com's business model is a cause for concern.