PARIS (Reuters) – Air France-KLM has returned to core profit in late summer. This beats the expectations of the Franco-Dutch airline company, as passengers nearly doubled due to the removal coronavirus travel restrictions.

The company’s earnings before interest and taxes, amortization, and depreciation (EBITDA), was 796 million euros ($930.13m) from July to September. That is up from the 442 million-euro loss in the same period in 2020.

Year-on-year, the number of passengers who booked flights in these three months has nearly doubled to 16.9 millions.

Steven Zaat, finance chief, told journalists that although we had expected a positive EBITDA (equivalent to 800 million euros), our projections were not met.

Air France KLM predicts that EBITDA for its final quarter will be in positive and the entire year 2021 will be “slightly positive”.

According to the group, it has seen an increase in the number of bookings for the November holidays and Christmas holidays since September’s announcement by the United States that it would open its borders to all Europeans who have been fully immunized.

Zaat said that Canada’s autumn reopenings and Singapore’s Singaporean reopenings helped with recovery. But long-haul travel was still hampered due to restrictions in Australia, China, and Japan.

It also reduced its net debt by 8.1 billion euro at the end September. This is a drop of 2.9 billion Euros from 2020.

Air France-KLM received 10.4 billion euro in loans last year, backed by France & the Netherlands. The company has been discussing for months a plan of recapitalisation to reduce the debt burden.

According to the company, it has agreed to repay 500m euros from a state-backed credit loan in the coming weeks. The remaining 3.5billion euros will be paid in three equal installments in 2023 and 2025.

After a capital increase earlier this year, which saw the French government nearly double its stake to less than 30%, the group stated that it is considering another rights sale under favorable market conditions.

($1 = 0.8558 euros)