Cathay Pacific Airways saw passenger traffic rise 3.8% year-on-year in August to 2.2 million passengers.
RPKs rose 1.9% in August, and ASKs were down 5%, says the Oneworld carrier. The passenger load factor rose 5.7 percentage points to 84.1%.
"Comparisons with 2008 are skewed due to the dampening of demand on our mainland China routes over the Olympic period last year," says Cathay Pacific GM for revenue management Tom Owen.
"Although the summer peak traffic arrived much later and at a lower yield than normal, we did see a strong recovery in pent-up regional demand for the month with an abating H1N1 impact. Traffic in the premium cabins, however, remained weak in comparison to previous years throughout August and at materially lower yields."
Cathay Pacific carried 131,732 tonnes of cargo and mail in August, down 6.3% year-on-year.
"Our cargo business showed further signs of bottoming out in August with the lowest year-on-year tonnage decline of the year to date and a continued increase in demand out of (our) key home market," says GM cargo sales & marketing Titus Diu. "However, while tonnage is undoubtedly picking up there is still a lot of competition in the market and our yield has yet to see any significant pickup from a very low base."
Cathay Pacific's operating statistics also include that of subsidiary Dragonair.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
