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Positive airline outlook yet to translate into capacity increases
October 19th 2021
A flurry of announcements about eased restrictions has set a buoyant tone in the airline industry but aviation data company, OAG, said this trend has yet to translate into capacity increases. Read More » OAG chief analyst, John Grant, noted in his latest blog that an additional six million seats were removed from the global market to the end of 2021. Total seats for 2021 now stand at 3.7 billion compared with 3.2 billion in 2020 and 5.7 billion in 2019. Grant said airlines remained cautious despite “market positivity” . “In part that may be because airlines have only been looking forward a few months at a time and most airlines remain focussed on their schedules to the end of 2021, but no carrier is rushing to add back any capacity in January at the moment and who can blame them?’’ he said. OAG’s current expectation is that global airline capacity will remain 13% below 2019 levels but will be 67% higher than 2021. An OAG table shows Asia is forecast to be a mixed bag in the first quarter of 2022 with Northeast Asia and South Asia faring better than the global average. Seat capacity in Southeast Asia is still predicted to be less than half of Q1 2019. “The recovery in Southeast Asia is reflected in capacity increasing by 7.2% week on week,” Grant said. “That is positive news, but in reality, it is only another 215,000 seats, perhaps a reflection of how far the market had fallen. It is still only operating at 31% of pre-COVID-19 levels.”
