Combined Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon traffic figures for February 2019 show an increase in the number of passengers carried and a drop in cargo and mail uplifted compared to the same month in 2018.
The Hong Kong-based carriers carried a total of 2,833,534 passengers last month—an increase of 1.0% compared to February 2018. The passenger load factor decreased 2.4 percentage points to 81.7%, while capacity increased by 5.9%.
In the first two months of 2019, the number of passenger carried grew by 4.3% while capacity increased by 6.5%.
The two airlines carried 131,320 tonnes of cargo and mail last month, a decrease of 9.9% compared to the same month last year. The cargo and mail load factor fell by 5.0 percentage points to 60.7%. Capacity decreased by 1.8% while cargo and mail revenue freight tonne kilometers (RFTKs) dropped by 9.3%.
In the first two months of 2019, the tonnage fell by 6.4% against a 0.4% dip in capacity and a 7.1% decrease in RFTKs.
Cathay Pacific director of commercial and cargo Ronald Lam said: “It is important to highlight that the early Chinese New Year holiday resulted in distortion in both passenger and cargo revenue growth for January and February.
“The holiday was characterized by strong demand and yield growth on short-haul routes in Asia, but overall passenger volumes softened sharply in the weeks after, especially in Economy Class. As a result, revenue growth was not able to keep up with capacity increases in February.”
For cargo, Lam said there was also slower demand pick-up after the holiday when compared with last year, especially out of mainland China and Hong Kong.
“We did however see good growth from Southeast Asia markets. We reduced some freighter capacity in February to match demand better,” he said.
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