Cathay Pacific carries over 10 million passengers in eight months

Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific has released its traffic figures for August 2023, showing that it has carried more than 10 million passengers in the first eight months of this year.

The airline carried a total of 1,784,980 passengers last month – an increase of 603 per cent compared with August 2022.

The month’s revenue passenger kilometres (RPKs) increased 342.8 per cent year on year.

Passenger load factor increased by 19.4 percentage points to 88 per cent, while capacity – measured in available seat kilometres (ASKs) – increased by 244.9 per cent year on year.

In the first eight months of 2023, the number of passengers carried increased by 1,302 per cent against a 633.1 per cent increase in capacity and an 876.7 per cent increase in RPKs, as compared with the same period for 2022.

Chief Customer and Commercial Officer Lavinia Lau said: “Travel demand remained strong as we entered the second month of the traditional peak summer season in August.

“In the first half of the month, we saw consistently high demand for leisure travel from Hong Kong and the rest of the Greater Bay Area to various short-haul destinations. We also saw increased demand for outbound travel from Japan to Hong Kong and onward destinations in Asia and Europe in mid-August, coinciding with the Obon holiday period in Japan. Meanwhile in the latter part of the month, there was a notable increase in student travel to Canada, the US and the UK from Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland ahead of the start of the new school year.”