In February 2024, Cathay Pacific Airways of Hong Kong will restart service to Chennai and Colombo. Prior to the pandemic, the airline last had regular service to both locations.
As demand for travel remains robust across its network, Cathay is progressively rebuilding its network and earlier this week stated that its recovery continues well on track.
Flights to Johannesburg were recently resumed by Cathay, who noticed “a very positive response” from the market.
“As we started the second month of the customary peak summer season in August, travel demand remained strong. We kept upping the frequency of our flights in order to keep up with the high demand. According to Cathay Pacific’s chief customer and commercial officer, Lavinia Lau, “Our recently resumed flights serving Johannesburg received a very positive response, particularly among business and leisure travelers flying to Hong Kong and beyond.”
“We observed a persistent strong demand for leisure travel from Hong Kong and the rest of the Greater Bay Area to a number of short-haul locations in the first half of the month. In mid-August, which coincided with the Obon holiday period in Japan, we also observed an upsurge in demand for outbound travel from Japan to Hong Kong and subsequent destinations in Asia and Europe. As the new school year began, there was a noticeable surge in student travel from Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland to Canada, the US, and the UK in the latter part of the month, according to Lau.
In September, the sustained demand for student travel to the UK in particular will provide our travel business a lift, and the picture overall for the rest of 2023 seems positive. We keep adding new flights for our consumers, especially to and from the Chinese Mainland, where we currently run roughly 170 round-trip flights a week to 15 cities and 16 airports, according to Lau.
The Oneworld airline accomplished the milestone of carrying more than 10 million passengers in the first eight months of 2023, according to Cathay Pacific’s traffic statistics for August 2023.
The airline carried 1.8 million passengers in total in August, an increase of more than 600% over August 2022.
