Record breaking: Ryanair carries its 200 millionth passenger in 2024/25

For the first time in European commercial aviation history, an airline has carried over 200 million passengers during a 12-month period. The company taking that accolade, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Ryanair, the European low-cost giant whose group of airlines includes Ryanair, Ryanair UK, Malta Air, Buzz, and Lauda Europe.

To mark passing the 200 millionth passenger milestone, Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline both in terms of fleet size and passengers carried, welcomed onboard its 200 millionth passenger for the 2024-25 in Madrid on Wednesday, March 26, 2025. The carrier welcomed 84-year-old Maria Cornelia Vos, who had flown from Fuerteventura to Madrid, landed at Madrid-Barajas Airport (MAD) in the Spanish capital at 12:35 local time on flight FR5469 operated by a Ryanair Boeing 737 MAX 8200 registered 9H-VUS.

Upon her safe arrival in Madrid following a two-hour eight-minute flight from the Atlantic island of Fuerteventura, the passenger graciously posed for photos with members of Ryanair staff in the terminal building.   

Ryanair“We are delighted to welcome Mrs Maria Cornelia Vos as our 200 millionth passenger this year,” said Ryanair’s CEO Michael O’Leary. “Ryanair is proud to have carried 200 million passengers in 2024/2025 and we are pleased that these 200 million passengers have saved on average €5 billion ($5.5bn) in total, compared to the average air fares of our competitor airlines.”

200 million passengers in a single calendar year is a new record both for Ryanair and for European aviation, with only a handful of other airlines worldwide able to match the feat. Other airlines that have surpassed this sizeable milestone include Delta Air Lines, which also flew 200 million during 2024/25, and American Airlines, which flew 248.7 million in the same year.

During the next 12 months, Ryanair’s latest forecasts show the carrier will pass this new record and will carry an estimated 206 million passengers. The original figure forecast for the year was originally 210 million for 2025/26, However, the airline was recently forced to scale back its ambitions for the year to 206 million as a result of ongoing supply chain delays and production bottlenecks at the Boeing 737 final assembly line based in Renton, Washington state. The airline has been forced to scale back its expansion plans and cut some routes as a result of a shortage of aircraft that will ensue.  

Markus Mainka / Shutterstock   

“We are working with Boeing to accelerate deliveries. Although Boeing 737 production is recovering from the Boeing strike at the end of 2024, we do not expect sufficient units to arrive by the summer of 2025,” O’Leary said in January 2025. “We are confident of receiving the remaining 29 aircraft on our order by March 2026, which will allow us to make up the backlog in increased traffic in the summer of 2026, rather than 2025,” he added.

Ryanair’s fleet currently consists of 612 aircraft, all of which are from the Boeing 737 family apart from a sub-fleet of 26 Airbus A320-200s operated exclusively by Lauda Europe. The average age of the current fleet is ten years, according to the aviation data website planespotters.net.  

Outlook for 2025

Looking ahead, Ryanair has said it expects ticket prices to rise by 4% to 6% during 2025, with only a partial recovery from the 8% decline last year, group CEO Michael O’Leary told Reuters on March 27, 2005.

“We’re operating on the basis this year that pricing will rise by between 4-6% and having fallen by 8% last year. So overall, pricing will be about 2% less than it was two years ago,” he said.

On a brighter note for the airline, during the recent temporary cessation of all flights into and out of London-Heathrow Airport (LHR) on March 21, 2025, O’Leary stated that Ryanair received around 10,000 extra bookings on flights in and out of various London airports which it serves (Luton, Stansted, and Gatwick). Passengers from numerous points across Europe turned to Ryanair as a lifeboat provider when they were unable to reach their intended destination due to a power outage that shut Heathrow Airport down entirely for almost 24 hours.

“We made a couple of hundred thousand euros of additional profit,” O’Leary added.

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