Traffic figures for the first half have come in pretty strong across the board, although capacity growth has been strong too. Unsurprisingly, low-cost carriers continue to outperform.
While airlines may be struggling on the financial front, as far as passenger traffic goes, there is plenty to smile about. Figures for the first half of the year show that healthy rises in passenger numbers are ensuring that load factors are increasing despite some hefty increases in capacity.
IATA figures for international traffic covering the year to May show that all regions of the world have seen traffic increases outstrip the extra capacity on offer.
Latin America, the Middle East and Africa have all seen double digit traffic gains – even if in the case of the first two at least it was nearly matched by aggressive increases in capacity.
In the USA, the airline lobby group the Air Transport Association (ATA) is expecting approximately 200 million passengers to fly during summer, up 4.1% on summer 2004. “Low fares continue to prompt high travel volumes and the situation this summer will be no exception,” said ATA president James May, while noting that intense competition and cost pressures mean that this is not feeding through to the bottom line.
Most of the traffic growth in the US market is being driven by regional and low-cost carriers,although recovery by majors has been in evidence, ranging from the low to high single digits. The weakest performers were Chapter 11 carriers United Airlines and US Airways.
The picture in Europe was more encouraging, with figures from the Association of European Airlines, which represents mainline carriers, showing Far Eastern traffic up by over 10% and intra-European traffic up by just over 7% for the year to May.
There was also a healthy increase in market segments that had been struggling early in the year, with North Atlantic and European domestic traffic up by over 5%.
Overall, traffic was up 7%, two percentage points ahead of capacity, enabling load factors to rise by 1.6 points to 74.2%.
European low-cost carriers reported pretty steady load factors for the early part of the summer season, with the major players reigning in some of their aggressive capacity growth as the sector matures.
In the Asia-Pacific region, there were some signs that capacity increases were starting to get ahead of traffic, with international revenue passenger kilometre (RPK) figures from the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) for May up by 5.9%, less than a capacity increase of 7.2%. This resulted in a 0.8 point decline in load factors to 67.6%.
AAPA figures for the year to May are a bit more healthy, showing that a traffic increase of 6.6% in terms of RPKs is still outstripping extra capacity of 5.9% available seat kilometres – with load factors up 0.5 points at 71.9%.
COLIN BAKER LONDON
Source: Airline Business
