Europe’s airlines report 11.5% dip
The Association of European Airlines (AEA) has reported its members’ overall passenger traffic was 11.5% lower during April 2002 than in April 2001.
The AEA said April showed the steepest monthly year-on-year decrease in 2002 to date, but pointed out that the results were affected by changes in its membership, namely the accession of Swiss and the exit of Sabena. In April 2001, Sabena carried 5.7% of AEA intra-European passenger traffic, 3.4% of North Atlantic and 8.2% of the African market, giving it an overall 3.2% share. AEA said total AEA growth rates for April 2002 will be affected to the extent that a proportion of this traffic, varying by region, has not been transferred to other AEA carriers.
The severest traffic losses continued to be on the North Atlantic routes, where overall volume was 21.3% down. Intra-European traffic fell 8.7%, while for Far East destinations there was a very small traffic growth of 0.6%.
The AEA said in Europe and on the North Atlantic, capacity decreases fairly closely matched the traffic pattern, leading to a slight improvement in load factors. On Far Eastern routes the market gain was achieved with a 5.1% capacity decrease, giving a substantial load factor improvement of 4.6 points, to record a figure in excess of 80%.
AEA said provisional data indicated that the capacity cutbacks and high occupancy rates so far this year are not delivering yield improvements.
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