Cathay Pacific sees tourist travel surge in April as business flyers stay home

Leisure travellers taking advantage of back-to-back Easter and Ching Ming Festival holidays last month helped drive up passenger volume at Cathay Pacific Airways to a high for the year but put a drag on the more profitable business traveller segment.

The latest monthly traffic figures released Friday by the company, which includes Cathay Pacific and Dragonair, show that holiday travellers were the key driver of a 2.5 percentage point year-on-year increase in passenger load factor to 87.2 per cent in April as both Easter and Ching Ming fell at the beginning of the month this year.

"Japan, Korea and Thailand were the most popular destinations for Easter getaways from Hong Kong though we also saw high load factors to other Asian destinations and Australia/New Zealand," said Patricia Hwang, the company's general manager of revenue management. The two airlines carried a total of 2.9 million passengers in April, the highest so far this year and up 7.7 per cent on the same month last year.

But demand for premium cabin seats was "behind expectations, especially on long-haul routes", Hwang said. The succession of holidays in the first four months of the year, which resulted in large gaps in working weeks, had affected Cathay's premium traffic, she said, while "the aftermath effect" from the Occupy protests late last year was also to blame.

"Holidays such as Chinese New Year in February and Easter in April are positive for load factors, but not so much for premium and business travel," she said.

Passenger traffic for Europe, Cathay's second largest market after North America in terms of revenue passenger kilometres, grew 9.3 per cent year on year in the first four months of the year, a reverse from sustained negative or flat growth last year.