Cathay Pacific recorded a slight increase in passenger traffic in 2016, despite falling demand on routes to and from mainland China.
Revealing its full-year results this week, the company revealed that Cathay Pacific and its Dragonair subsidiary, recently rebranded as Cathay Dragon, boarded a total of 34.32 million passengers last year, just 0.8% higher than in 2015.
The airlines operated a total of 78,830 flights in 2016, while the average passenger load factor – or the number of seats filled per aircraft – dipped 1.2 percentage points to 84.5%.
Cathay struggled with falling demand on routes to and from mainland China (-0.5%) and the Middle East & South Asia (-13.4%) last year, but this was offset by increased traffic to and from Southeast Asia (+3.7%), Northeast Asia (+0.8%), North America (+0.8%) and Europe (+6.0%). Traffic to and from Oceania was almost flat (+0.1%).
Cathay launched new several new destinations in 2016, including London Gatwick and Madrid, and it has already announced plans to fly to Barcelona in 2017.
