The airline and operator revealed a half-year group operating profit (six months to 30 September) of £617 million in a trading update on Thursday (23 November), up 19% on the same period 12 months ago.

Group profit before foreign exchange revaluation and taxation, meanwhile, ran to £664.6 million – up 32% year-on-year – off the back of £4.4 billion revenue, up by nearly a quarter compared with H1 2022.

Jet2 increased seat capacity by 7% this summer while maintaining an average load factor of 90.7%, level with summer 2022. It was also able to fill its aircraft this summer with more higher margin package holiday passengers, which increased by 4.9 percentage points to 70.8%.

Summer headwinds included the August bank holiday weekend Nats air traffic control outage, wildfires in Rhodes and flooding in Skiathos, which Jet2 said had impacted profitability by around £14 million.

It added it was "mindful" of the macro-economic environment and was monitoring "current geo-political challenges" to assess how these may impact future spending behaviour.

This winter, Jet2 has put 4.49 million seats on sale, 21% more than last year,with the proportion of package holiday passengers occupying these seats currently up by 2.6 percentage points year-on-year.

Jet2 said winter bookings had stalled slightly in recent weeks with average load factors currently down by 1.3 percentage points compared with winter 2022/23 at the same stage, but stressed that pricing to date "remains robust", with more than 40% of winter bookings traditionally made between January and March.

Summer 2024 seat capacity, meanwhile, currently stands at 17.19 million, around 12% higher than summer 2023. Jet2 said it was encouraged by bookings and pricing for summer 2024, with average load factors running two percentage points ahead of last year at the same point.

As a result, the business has stated it is "currently on track" to deliver group profit before foreign exchange revaluation and taxation for its 2023/24 full-year (year to 31 March 2024) of between £480 million and £520 million, in line with previous guidance.

“We are pleased to have delivered another strong financial performance during the first half of the financial year, despite the well-publicised external challenges faced," said Jet2.com and Jet2holidays chief executive Steve Heapy. "This clearly demonstrates tour end-to-end package holiday is a popular and resilient product, and is the right product for price conscious customers."

As package holiday customers continue to comprise an ever-increasing proportion of its business, Jet2 said its package proposition was delivering "all-in cost certainty", hailing it "a wonderful product for challenging economic times".

Jet2’s workforce swelled to more than 15,000 during peak summer this year, with the addition of more than 2,500 new employees since the end of March. The airline and operator said this had allowed it to build "sufficient resilience" into its operations, which it credited for its ability to "effectively navigate" the Nats meltdown, the wildfires in Rhodes, flooding in Skiathos and "record" air traffic control strikes in Europe.

It has pledged to retain a larger proportion of employees through the winter months "to ensure appropriate operational resilience ahead of next summer" and to staff up further to support the launch of its 11th UK base, Liverpool, in the spring.