SWISS Posts CHF421m Nine-Month Operating Result

ZURICH — SWISS (LX) published its nine-month operating results on November 3, 2026. The airline posted adjusted earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of CHF421.4m, up 2.5% from CHF411.2m a year earlier. Operating income amounted to CHF4.38bn, up 5.3% from CHF4.17bn. However, SWISS said substantially higher fuel costs limited the earnings improvement despite higher revenue. The airline expects continuing high fuel prices to weigh on the last quarter of 2026 and on 2027.

Calculated from the airline's rounded operating income figures, the adjusted operating margin was about 9.6%, compared with 9.9% a year earlier. SWISS earned slightly more overall, but retained a smaller share of each franc of operating income.

SWISS said it transported some 13.7 million passengers in the first nine months of 2026, a 0.7-percent decline on the prior-year period. Some 106,500 flights were operated, a decline of 3.0 percent. Total capacity, measured in available seat kilometers (ASK), was reduced by 0.5 percent, while total traffic, measured in revenue passenger kilometers (RPK), was 0.1 percent below its prior-year level. Systemwide seat load factor (SLF), the share of available seats filled, improved by 0.4 percentage points. SWISS’s flight operations were mixed in performance terms. Nine-month departure punctuality was raised to 69.0 percent, a 0.8-percentage-point improvement on the prior-year period. But the operating stability of 96.9 percent was 0.9 percentage points below its prior-year level. SWISS said the summer months, particularly extreme weather events, posed significant operational challenges.

Key Figures for the First Nine Months of 2026

Key Figures for the Third Quarter of 2026

Figures: SWISS. Changes are the airline's reported percentages, based on unrounded figures. A dash means no absolute value is supplied in the release table; pp means percentage points.

Comments from Airline Officials

“We achieved a solid operating result for the first nine months of 2026,” said Chief Financial Officer Dennis Weber. “And in doing so, despite challenging market conditions, we’ve made progress back toward our traditional earnings strength. That this progress was so small, despite strong travel demand and our rigorous cost economies, shows just how much impact higher fuel costs are having on our business profitability.”

According to SWISS, demand for air travel remained high in the third quarter. The airline said yields also showed encouraging trends, especially in premium cabins and on long-haul routes.

“The additional revenue that we generated broadly equaled our additional fuel expense,” Weber said. “As a result, we were able to largely offset these higher fuel costs, but only slightly raised our earnings for the period. This makes it all the more vital that we continue to consistently lower our costs wherever we can influence these. The cost economies and efficiency measures which we initiated at an early stage are increasingly taking effect and have helped to prevent any earnings decline. They won’t yet be enough on their own, though, to sustainably improve our profitability.”

The pressure on earnings follows the fuel-cost increases Airways covered in Lufthansa Group's second-quarter results, when profit fell despite higher revenue.