Cathay Pacific traffic increased 8% in 2015
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Cathay Pacific and its sister carrier, Dragonair, boarded a combined total of 34.1 million passengers in 2015, up 7.9% year-on-year.
The airlines operated a total of 78,634 flights, up 4.2%, while available seat capacity increased 5.9% and the average passenger load factor rose 2.4 percentage points to a healthy 85.7%.
Cathay was boosted by strong demand on routes to and from Europe (+14.5%, in terms of revenue passenger kilometres) and Southeast Asia (+13.4%) last year, while traffic on mainland Chinese routes increased 6.9%. The only regional decline was seen on routes to and from South Asia and the Middle East, which dipped 1.9%.
For the month of December, Cathay carried 2.9m passengers, up 5.8% year-on-year. And the airline’s general manager for revenue management, Patricia Hwang, said holiday traffic remained strong.
“As expected, we handled high volumes of passengers as the Christmas travel peak got underway,” Ms Hwang said. “We operated fewer pairs of extra sectors than Christmas last year – 31 compared to 35 – but this was balanced by more scheduled capacity on a number of routes.
“Traffic to holiday hotspots such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore was very high, though demand to Bangkok was still being affected by the bombing incident in 2015. We also saw strong demand on most of our long-haul routes, especially in the economy cabin. However, unfavourable currency movements continued to have a considerable impact on yield,” she added.
This year, Cathay is planning to launch new routes to Madrid and London Gatwick, and the first of 48 new Airbus A350 aircraft is scheduled to be delivered in the coming months.
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