Hong Kong travel trade flies high in January as Cathay Pacific carries 1 million passengers while city’s visitor numbers surge
- Cathay says its traffic figures show positive signs in its rebuilding and restoration of operations, after carrying 1.03 million passengers in January
- Hong Kong Tourism Board says number of visitors to the city in January rose threefold, to nearly half a million from about 160,000 in December
The city’s flagship carrier on Wednesday said it would add more cross-border flights by the end of this month after pandemic-related travel restrictions with mainland China were lifted gradually in January.
The Hong Kong Tourism Board revealed that the number of visitors to the city in January had risen threefold, to 498,689 from 160,578 in December. Last year, 604,564 people visited Hong Kong, a fraction of the 55.9 million tourists in 2019.
Most of January’s visitors were from the mainland, with nearly 280,000 in total.
“Apart from visitors with essential travel needs such as overnight stopovers, family visits or business trips, the share of leisure visitors also showed an increase,” the Tourism Board said in a statement on overall arrivals.
Hong Kong dropped almost all Covid-19 measures in late December, including mandatory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for arrivals, its vaccine pass scheme and quarantine requirements for close contacts, following similar action by the mainland.
Cathay said its January traffic figures showed positive signs in its rebuilding and restoration of operations. It carried a total of 1.03 million passengers, a more than 4,000 per cent increase compared with the same month a year ago.
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On average, it carried more than 33,000 passengers per day last month, up about 27 per cent from around 26,000 in December. The airline operated 18 per cent more capacity in January than it did in the previous month.
Its bread and butter cargo business performed well, growing 28.1 per cent year on year to 95,139 tonnes in January.
“The new year got off to a positive start,” said Lavinia Lau, the airline’s chief customer and commercial officer.
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Following the resumption of quarantine-free travel with the mainland for the first time in three years on January 8, Lau said, the company had seen greater demand in and out of Hong Kong.
Cathay also saw a small uptick in cargo demand before Lunar New Year, a result of “more normal cross-border trucking services” with the easing of the Covid-19 situation on the mainland.
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Since mid-December, Hong Kong truck drivers have been allowed to go directly to pickup points on the mainland. The arrangement replaced a previous rule that drivers had to pass their cargoes to mainland truckers after they crossed the border.
But demand for Cathay’s cargo service softened during the Lunar New Year period as factories closed for the holiday.
“Looking at February and beyond, we are working hard to increase our passenger flight capacity as much as possible over the coming months, especially in the lead-up to the Easter holiday,” Lau said.
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The airline aimed to operate more than 100 return flights per week to 14 cities on the mainland by the end of this month, she said.
Tourism sector lawmaker Yiu Pak-leung said he believed Cathay’s passenger volume could be raised even faster if restrictions on flights from Hong Kong to countries such as South Korea and Japan were scrapped.
“If there were no such restrictions and flights operated on market demand only, the resumption could be further sped up,” Yiu said.
He also stayed positive on the overall growth of visitor numbers to the city, noting that there was no dramatic increase in January as Lunar New Year was not a popular travelling time for mainlanders.
He said the number of visitors was expected to grow steadily following the Lunar New Year holiday.
The aviation industry, meanwhile, suffered a substantial loss of manpower as a result of the pandemic, which drastically reduced air traffic volume.
Secretary for Transport and Logistics Lam Sai-hung told lawmakers on Wednesday that the Airport Authority was conducting a fresh round of airport manpower surveys, which was expected to be completed within this quarter.
With the survey results, Lam said, the government and the authority would come up with relevant measures in the second half of the year to drive sustainable manpower development in the industry.
