Lifting of flight ban boosts Cathay Pacific’s passenger total by 82.2% 

This is, however, still 98.7% lower than April 2019 figures.

Cathay Pacific carried 40,823 total passengers in April 2022, up by 82.2% from 22,204 total passengers in the same period last year, following the government's scrapping the ban on incoming flights from nine countries last month. 

This figure, however, is still a 98.7% decline compared to pre-pandemic times in April 2019, Cathay Pacific said.

Revenue passenger kilometres went up by 60.7%, on a yearly basis, but decreased 98.5% compared to April 2019 figures.

Passenger load factor grew by 31.5 percentage points to 55.6% whilst capacity, measured in available seat kilometres, went down by 30.2% year-on-year (YoY), and declined by 97.7% compared with April 2019 levels.  

As this happened, the airline carried 92,361 tonnes of cargo in April 2022, which went up by 26.3% from 73,113 tonnes of cargo in the same period last year. But it decreased by 43.6% compared with April 2019.

The month’s cargo revenue tonne-kilometers went down 13.2% YoY, and were down 62.4% compared to April 2019.

Aside from the lifting of the flight ban, Cathay Pacific Chief Customer and Commercial Officer Ronald Lam said growth in passengers was also due to the adjustment of the quarantine period from 14 to seven days.

He also noted an increased demand for residents seeking to return home to Hong Kong, specifically those coming from the UK.
 
“In view of this stronger demand, we increased our passenger flight capacity by about 25% compared with March, although we still only operated about 2% of our pre-pandemic passenger flight capacity last month,” said Lam.