Airlines in Asia Pacific including the Philippines reported that cargo demand continues to increase while international passenger traffic remained weak due to the border restrictions and the uneven progress in vaccination rollouts.
Data from the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) showed that only 3.7 million passengers flew in January to March this year,down 93.8 percent from the same period last year.
In March, only 1.1 million international passengers flew on the region’s carriers, equivalent to 13.2 percent of passenger volumes in the samemonth last year when travel was already in sharp decline.
Available seat capacity averaged 27 percent of the previous year’s volumes, as the majority of the region’s commercial passenger fleets remained grounded. The international passenger load factor fell by 29.4 percentage points to average 23.8 percent for the month.
In the Philippines, carriers registered an 85 percent decline in the number of passengers carried in 2020 and are bound to lose P65 billion this year.
From 2.28 million passengers carried in December 2019, the number went down to just 10 percent of that volume in December 2020.
From 10,769 in December 2019, the number of flights fell to 2,975 in December 2020.
International air cargo demand, as measured in freight ton kilometers, grew 8.6 percent in the first quarter this year versus last year same period.
Cargo traffic in March grew by 16.1 percent year-on-year — the best performing month since December 2019. Offered freight capacity rose by a comparatively slower12.7 percent year-on-year, leading to a 2.2 percentage point increase in the average internationalfreight load factor to 74.3 percent for the month.
