While the last seven days saw flight capacity in Europe drop by 52.9% ,versus the previous week, carriers in North East Asia have arrested the decline and offer a “glimmer of hope” with regard to a rebound in demand, according to John Grant, partner at Midas Aviation.
Speaking on a webinar, Grant said that flight capacity has been steadily declining since January, but the spread of Covid 19 globally meant last week saw a dramatic fall in the number of seats offered as a number of countries introduced travel bans and movement restrictions.
“In the past 10 weeks there have been a number of hotspots,” said Grant. “Such as North East Asia, where China literally nearly wiped out 8 million seats in one week. We thought that was dramatic, but now has Covid 19 has spreads across the globe in both directions the impact is really being felt.”
According to Grant, the week ending March 23 saw a 52.9% reduction in capacity compared to the previous week, and he warned that these figures would rise further during this week, as more capacity cuts hit the sector.
“That 53% reduction might seem dramatic - and believe me it is I’ve never seen numbers like that in my life - but I can assure you that next week’s will be even more so because a large slug of US international capacity, large pieces of the Ryanair network, as well Etihad, is about to go and it will impact those numbers further.”
Grant said that while these figures are serious, news from North East Asia hints at a potential containment to the loss of numbers. While the region still lost 0.9% of its capacity in the previous week this was by far the smallest decline globally.
“Interestingly in terms of glimmers of hope look at North East Asia. And whilst in the context of the 20th of January, it is at half the capacity of ten weeks earlier, we are now at a point where they have plateaued out and capacity actually is beginning to recover.”
But the decline in European airline activity was the dominant theme, while Peru saw the largest percentage fall in seat capacity in the previous week – 71% - due to a total flight ban - seven of the ten biggest falls were registered by European countries.
According to Grant’s figures Portugal, Spain, Finland Denmark, Poland, Austria and Greece had shown the biggest percentage falls globally, in the previous week as Europe became the epicentre of Covid 19.
“There are now about two thirds few seats offered than this time last week and we are going to see a further downturn from there. Big markets like Spain have lost 1.5 million seats in a week, Germany has 1 million fewer and the UK is down 1.3 million.
The number of airlines operating in Europe has not fallen so dramatically, with Grant saying that while 215 airlines had filed to capacity to operate in Europe this week – the number includes non-European carriers serving the region, such as American and Emirates – compared with 251, a large chunk of these airlines are running at virtually zero capacity.
“But staggeringly 61% of those 215 airlines will operate less than 1000 seats, that’s around the equivalent of five A320 single aisle services.”