Cathay Pacific is raising London-Hong Kong frequency to as many as four flights a day in December as it rebuilds its post-pandemic schedule.
Traffic figures for September continued to reflect the positive impact of further relaxation of the Hong Kong government’s travel restrictions and quarantine requirements.
This included the removal of mandatory hotel quarantine for locally based aircrew from September 10 and for travellers arriving in Hong Kong from September 26.
The rule change helped carryings double to 265,845 over September 2021, but was still 89% down on the pre-pandemic level in the same month in 2019. Passenger capacity stood at just 16% of pre-Covid levels last month.
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Looking forward, chief customer and commercial officer Ronald Lam indicated that Heathrow would see a “substantial increase” in passenger flights in November and December.
“An additional 31,500 seats will be offered over the two months and on certain days in December we will be operating four flights a day,” he added.
“Customers can also look forward to the return of our First class offering on our prime London Heathrow flight, CX251/CX252, starting 5/6 December respectively.”
Student traffic from both Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland helped boost carryings in September. Overall passenger numbers rose month-on-month to more than 8,800 a day, while the load factor was 72.5%.
“Demand for student travel to the US tapered down from the second week of September, but this was balanced by growing demand among UK-bound student traffic,” Lam said.
“As such, we increased the number of flights operated between Hong Kong and the UK from 111 sectors in August to 134 in September, with load factor on flights to London reaching 96%. We also added capacity on flights to Japan and south-east Asia.
“Aside from student traffic, inbound traffic to Hong Kong also improved, largely driven by demand from the US and Canada.
“The removal of hotel quarantine arrangements for passengers arriving in Hong Kong was a very welcome development that has helped boost sentiment for travel. In the last week of September, we saw a considerable increase in demand for flights to Singapore, Bangkok and Seoul.
“Looking ahead, we remain focused on adding as many passenger flights as we can, and have already added more than 400 flight sectors in October to and from regional and long-haul destinations since the September announcements by the government. We have resumed passenger flights to five destinations this month – Madrid, Milan, Dubai, Kathmandu and Bengaluru – bringing our total number of destinations to 51 in October.
“As we said in June, our target is to double the number of destinations offered by the end of the year compared with the 29 we operated in January 2022, and we are on course to achieving that.
“We will continue to add more flights in the coming months. In addition to the flight sectors previously scheduled for November and December, we will be adding close to 700 and 1,200 sectors respectively. This will add more than half a million seats for passengers to choose from.”
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