Increased travel demand for Cathay Pacific at end of 2022

Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific has published its traffic figures for December 2022.

It carried a total of 801,088 passengers, an increase of 768.7 per cent compared to the same month in 2021. However, this was a 73.3 per cent decrease compared to the pre-pandemic level in December 2019.

The month’s revenue passenger kilometres (RPKs) increased 545.2 per cent year-on-year, but were down 68.4 per cent against December 2019 numbers.

Passenger load factor increased by 46.7 percentage points to 83.3 per cent, while capacity, measured in available seat kilometres (ASKs), increased by 183.5 per cent year-on-year, but decreased by 67.8 per cent compared with December 2019 levels.

Chief Executive Officer Ronald Lam said: “December saw a drastic uptick in travel demand, with Christmas being the first major holiday since travel restrictions in Hong Kong were lifted, although we were still only operating about 32 per cent of pre-pandemic passenger flight capacity levels. We carried over 25,800 passengers per day on average.”

In the full year of 2022, the number of passengers carried increased by 291 per cent against a 51.6 per cent increase in capacity and a 258.3 per cent increase in RPKs, as compared with 2021.

Looking to the future, Lam added: “We remain fully committed to restoring connectivity and capacity at our home hub. As a Group, which includes passenger airlines Cathay Pacific and HK Express, we anticipate we will be operating about 70 per cent of pre-pandemic passenger flight capacity by the end of 2023 with the aim of returning to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2024.

“In terms of passenger travel, we expect demand will continue to be strong in January and the Chinese New Year period, driven by leisure traffic from Hong Kong. Following the return of quarantine-free travel between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, we are continuing to add more flights and destinations as quickly as is feasible. We aim to operate more than 100 return flights per week to and from 14 cities in the Chinese mainland by the end of February.”

The revitalisation of Hong Kong’s tourism industry post-pandemic is paramount, with the tourism board offering free tickets to travellers as an incentive to return.