HONG KONG, 16 December 2022: Cathay Pacific released its traffic figures for November 2022 on Wednesday, which reflect the first signs of recovery for the airline and the Hong Kong international aviation hub.
The airline carried 526,827 passengers last month, an increase of 652.1% compared with November 2021 but a 79.9% decrease compared with the pre-pandemic level in November 2019.
The month’s revenue passenger kilometres (RPKs) increased 565.5% year-on-year but were down 73.7% versus November 2019. The passenger load factor increased by 51.7 percentage points to 78.5%. Capacity, measured in available seat kilometres (ASKs), increased by 127.2% year-on-year but decreased by 73.1% compared with November 2019 levels.
In the first 11 months of 2022, passengers carried increased by 220.5% against a 33.9% increase in capacity and a 211.9% increase in RPKs, compared with the same period for 2021.
Chief customer and commercial officer Ronald Lam said: “We continue to see positive signs for our travel business. Sentiment and demand for travel out of Hong Kong continued to improve in November. We also saw increased visiting friends and relatives (VFR) traffic into Hong Kong, particularly from long-haul origins such as North America, Europe and the South West Pacific. Transit traffic via the Hong Kong hub also improved as we grew our network of destinations.
“On average, we carried about 17,600 passengers daily in November, up from around 13,000 in October. Passenger flight capacity increased by about 16% versus the previous month. Overall, we operated 27% of pre-pandemic capacity levels in November.
“We continued to add more flights to more destinations last month, in particular to and from popular places in Japan as well as Southeast Asia, which saw huge demand from Hong Kong. As expected, Japan was our top destination regarding passenger numbers, while the load factor on these flights stayed at 86%. November also saw the resumption of passenger flights to Denpasar (Bali), Tokyo (Haneda) and Zurich.”
Outlook
Cathay Pacific welcomes the Hong Kong SAR Government’s latest measures to facilitate travel to Hong Kong, particularly the decision to remove the Amber Code restrictions under the Vaccine Pass for inbound persons entering Hong Kong effective last Wednesday.
Lam said: “As we approach the festive Christmas and New Year holiday period, travel demand continues to improve. We are further increasing our passenger flight capacity and resuming more destinations, including Sapporo, Fukuoka, Penang and Dhaka in December and Phuket and Nagoya in January next year. We expect short-haul routes to leisure destinations such as Japan and Southeast Asia will remain strong, continuing into the Chinese New Year holiday peak as well.”
Premium First class service resumes on prime routes such as London Heathrow, specifically on the CX251/CX252 roundtrip flight. First class travel will also return to Paris (CX261/CX260) from 18 January 2023 and on the Tokyo (Haneda) route (CX548/CX549) from 1 February.
