--- title: "Ryanair blames the Iran war for a third off its profit. The numbers are more mixed." description: "Europe's largest budget airline says fuel costs and nervous passengers cut quarterly profit by 34 percent. Fuel did roughly double. But it also flew 6 percent more passengers and collected 6 percent less per seat, which is a pricing problem as much as a war." category: "Business" category_url: https://herald.la/category/business author: "Brandon Cole" published: 2026-07-20T18:04:00.000Z updated: 2026-07-20T18:04:00.000Z canonical: https://herald.la/article/ryanair-blames-the-iran-war-for-a-third-off-its-profit-the-numbers-are-more-mixe tags: ["ryanair", "airlines", "jet-fuel", "iran-war", "lax"] --- # Ryanair blames the Iran war for a third off its profit. The numbers are more mixed. Europe's largest budget airline says fuel costs and nervous passengers cut quarterly profit by 34 percent. Fuel did roughly double. But it also flew 6 percent more passengers and collected 6 percent less per seat, which is a pricing problem as much as a war. Ryanair reported that pre-tax profit for the April-to-June quarter fell about 34 percent, to roughly €593 million, and attributed the drop to the war with Iran: fuel costs up, passengers hesitant to book. Both halves of that are worth examining separately, because one is straightforwardly true and the other is a company's account of its own results. ## The fuel part is real Jet fuel roughly doubled over the period as strikes on Iran disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not a matter of interpretation. Ryanair had hedged around 80 percent of its fuel requirement at lower prices, which is why the airline is reporting a bad quarter rather than a catastrophic one. The unhedged remainder is where the damage landed. Hedging is the whole story of which airlines survive an oil shock comfortably. A carrier that locked in prices before February is having a very different year from one that did not, and the difference has nothing to do with how well either is run. ## The passenger part is more complicated Ryanair carried about 6 percent more passengers than a year earlier. Revenue rose about 1 percent. Average fares fell about 6 percent. That combination does not describe passengers refusing to fly. It describes an airline discounting to keep planes full. Chief executive Michael O'Leary attributed the need to stimulate fares to [the Middle East conflict, worries about European jet fuel supply, economic uncertainty and later booking](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/20/ryanair-q1-earnings-iran-war-summer-fares.html), and the airline's finance chief put it more mildly: people are as keen to travel as ever, but booking later. Later booking is a genuine and costly phenomenon for an airline, because it undermines the yield management that low-cost carriers depend on. It is also not the same as war-driven demand destruction, and the company's own executives described something closer to the former. Operating costs meanwhile rose about 11 percent, well ahead of revenue. Some of that is fuel. Not all of it is. ## The honest reading A company reporting a poor quarter has an obvious incentive to attribute it to a war rather than to its own pricing power, and readers should apply that discount to any such explanation, including this one. The fair summary is that an external shock and a softer fare environment arrived together, that the fuel shock is unambiguous, and that Ryanair's revenue per passenger was under pressure in ways the war does not fully explain. The company declined to give full-year profit guidance, saying its outlook is highly sensitive to further escalation. ## What it means from Los Angeles Ryanair does not fly here. It flies short-haul within Europe, and no Angeleno will book one to get anywhere from LAX. The relevance is the fuel price, which is global. [US carriers have faced sharply higher jet fuel costs](https://www.npr.org/2026/04/24/nx-s1-5797455/airlines-face-headwinds-as-iran-war-leads-to-rising-fuel-costs) since the strikes began, and the large network airlines have warned of substantial additional annual fuel expense if prices hold. Fuel is typically among the largest single line items in an airline's cost base, and sustained increases reach passengers eventually through fares, capacity cuts on marginal routes, or fees. For someone booking a transatlantic flight out of LAX this autumn, the mechanism connecting a tanker in the Persian Gulf to the price on the screen runs through exactly the arithmetic Ryanair reported on Monday. ## Sources - [Ryanair profits drop as Iran war puts off passengers and lifts fuel costs](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8nldwj12jo) - [Ryanair Q1 earnings: Iran war and summer fares](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/20/ryanair-q1-earnings-iran-war-summer-fares.html) - [Airlines face headwinds as Iran war leads to rising fuel costs](https://www.npr.org/2026/04/24/nx-s1-5797455/airlines-face-headwinds-as-iran-war-leads-to-rising-fuel-costs)