Leading Leisure Travel Group

The Leisure Travel business is committed to providing scheduled holiday flights by its award-winning airline, Jet2.com, and ATOL licensed package holidays by its acclaimed tour operator, Jet2holidays, to destinations in the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands and to European Leisure Cities.

Jet2.com and Jet2holidays are the UK’s third-largest airline and second-largest tour operator respectively.

Read our Annual Report & Accounts for the year ended 31 March 2020 >> Read our Half Year Results for the 6 months ended 30 September 2019 >>

Our growth story and financial strength

Financial highlights

For the year ended 31 March 2020 Dart Group plc generated over £3.5 billion of revenue. This improved by £0.6 billion compared to the year ended 31 March 2019, which was primarily driven by the Leisure Travel business.

The following charts depict our five-year revenue and operating profit history:

The increased profits reflect the continuing strong demand for our Leisure Travel products.

We Take People on Holiday!

Our performance for the financial year reflects the growing success of our Leisure Travel products - package holidays with our tour operator, Jet2holidays, and holiday flights with our scheduled airline, Jet2.com – which has led to continuing strong customer demand for both.

During the year, Jet2.com flew a total of 14.62m (2019: 12.82m) flight-only and package holiday single sector passengers, a growth of 14%.

Demand for our Real Package Holidays™ continued to grow, as Jet2holidays took 3.77m (2019: 3.17m) customers on package holidays, an increase of 19%, with our flight-only product enjoyed by 7.06m (2019: 6.49m) single sector passengers, a growth of 9%.

Taking a holiday is one of the most important and rewarding family events of the year and the end-to-end Real Package Holidays™ experience allows us to add greater value at each point in our customers’ journey. We believe that sustained investment in our “Customer First” proposition will ensure we continue to deliver consistently attractive holiday experiences, giving us a wonderful opportunity to delight our customers from start to finish, time and time again.

Our Operational Highlights

Celebrating 10 years of our ‘any duration holidays’

In October 2019, we celebrated a decade of ‘any duration holidays’!

Since breaking away from the long-established conventional 7 or 14-night package holiday, our ‘any duration holidays’ have paved the way for our customers to enjoy the freedom of tailoring their stay according to the time they have available. Forget 7 or 14 nights – we wanted to remind our customers that they could stay for as many nights as they liked, whether that’s 4, 11, 23 or something else - the true flexibility that today’s holidaymakers require!

The Jet2Suite at Leeds Beckett University

Over at Leeds Beckett University’s School of Events, Tourism and Hospitality Management, we opened the Jet2Suite, a brand-new facility to provide students with the right tools to learn about our industry. The ribbon was cut by our HR Director, who was joined by a host of guest speakers and delegates. With more than 90 of our Jet2.com and Jet2holidays colleagues having graduated from Leeds Beckett University, this partnership will be a great opportunity to upskill students and showcase our broad array of attractive job roles.

Expanded range of onboard meals

In line with the growing need to meet the varied dietary requirements of our customers, as well as enticing those who perhaps want to enjoy a bit more of the “high life”, we expanded our onboard menu.
Customers flying with us can now also browse our range of gluten-free and vegan choices, among our tasty selection of ‘Flavours from Around the World’, when they add meals to their booking. There’s the option of an all-day breakfast or roast chicken dinner for those with a gluten intolerance, while vegans can pick from an all-day breakfast too or a Moroccan vegetable tagine. Additionally, we have listened to our customer feedback and stocked a range of premium drinks and mixers to wide customer acclaim! A happy and pleasant start to the overall holiday experience!

Launch of Jet2 Travel Technologies

Jet2 Travel Technologies (‘Jet2TT’) was set-up in early 2019 as an extension of our existing Leeds and Sheffield IT development and testing teams, with the aim of increasing our capacity to meet our many industry-leading IT innovations and business-critical development projects.

In September 2019, we officially opened our state-of-the-art Jet2 Travel Technologies (‘Jet2TT’) facility in Pune, India. A number of our UK Directors helped to commemorate the occasion by travelling to Pune, where they were able to spend time with all our new colleagues and the local media talking about the success story of Jet2.com and Jet2holidays so far, as well as the vision for the exciting future of Jet2TT.

The last few months has seen a steady build up of the team, with a focus on sharing our Jet2.com core values and working practices to enable our colleagues across all sites to Work As One Team.

A bright future ahead

Despite today’s uncertainties our business model remains unchanged - we will continue to dedicate significant resources to provide Real Package Holidays™ and deliver wonderful holiday experiences with priceless memories, ensuring that the customer remains at the centre of everything we do. We believe that we have the right customer-focused strategy to grow both our package holiday and flight-only products. Whilst flight-only remains very important, our higher margin package holiday business has tremendous further potential as our reputation for providing ‘package holidays you can trust’^TM strengthens. This gives us every confidence that with our focused approach, our Customers will continue to be keen to travel with us from our Rainy Island to the sun spots of the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands and to European Leisure Cities and Jet2 will emerge from this crisis an even stronger company.

A leading Leisure Travel group