Ali Gayward also announced the start date for the relaunch of a service linking Inverness with Belfast. She revealed that twice-weekly flights between the Highland capital and Belfast International Airport will take off on July 2.

Ms Gayward was unable to commit to a firm date for the return of a daily service between Aberdeen and Gatwick but suggested it could happen by July or sooner.

The news comes as Easyjet announced its 2021 half-year results revealing underlying pre-tax losses of £701 million for the six months to March 31. The results are against a deficit of £193m a year ago.

Easyjet brought back its Aberdeen-Gatwick flights at the start of May last year following a high-profile campaign to revive the route, which easyJet had dropped in early 2019 due to a “reduction in demand”.

The airline, which previously flew twice a day between Aberdeen and Gatwick from Sunday to Friday, with one flight in each direction on Sundays, restarted the route as a daily service.

The service has since been reduced to four flights a week in each direction during the pandemic, but Ms Gayward said that could change soon.

She added: “The aim is, as soon as the demand is there for it, to bring it back up to a daily service. At the moment we’re just trying to match our capacity with demand.”

EasyJet’s relaunched service between Inverness and Belfast, together with other UK routes being added to the roster, is targeting staycation demand.

The airline is also preparing for a more imminent take-off to more green list destinations, such as Portugal, following an easing of UK travel restrictions, The Press and Journal reports. 

Ms Gayward said she expected these flights to be popular, given the likely pent-up demand for holidays, and despite the hassle and added cost of required Covid-19 tests.

Passenger numbers at easyJet for the six months ending 31 March 2021 decreased by 89.4% to 4.1 million, compared to 38.6m the year before.

EasyJet expects to fly only around 15% of its pre-pandemic flight programme until the end of next month despite international leisure travel restarting this week. While capacity will still be only around 15% of 2019 levels in its third quarter, the airline expects to ramp up its programme from next month onwards to meet “pent-up demand”.

The airline has added more than 105,000 seats since the government announced the so-called green list countries, from which UK travellers do not need to quarantine on return.

EasyJet said it could not give any further guidance for full-year financial expectations, due to uncertainty caused by the pandemic. It warned the trend for late bookings due to last-minute changes to travel restrictions would impact load factors, a measure of how well airlines fill their planes.