Chinese New Year capacity trends
In most airline markets, the first quarter is the slowest season of the year. In China, however, Q1 is peak season because of the Lunar New Year (which falls on Feb. 1 this year). Airline capacity at Chinese airports, as you can see from the red bar chart below, still isn’t back to where it was in 2019, before Covid.
But that’s only because of the freeze in international demand due to China’s mostly closed borders. Domestic capacity alone is set to to hit a record, with 17% more seats scheduled this Q1 than Q1, 2019. There is a chance that China opens its borders later this quarter, driving airlines to shift capacity back from domestic to international. But below is the situation as it looked on Jan 25th.
To be clear, this is not a case of Chinese airlines adding capacity in response to rising demand. It’s more about redeploying planes from international to domestic where they’ll in most cases at least lose less money. Air China for one, filled just 65% of its domestic seats in December, compared to the 80% load factor it achieved in December 2019.
As a deeper dive into Diio by Cirium data shows, nearly all major Chinese airlines will have record levels of capacity this quarter. The one big exception in Hainan Airlines, a pre-pandemic growth machine that later began contracting amid a major debt crisis.
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Media contacts:
Rachel Humphries
June Lee
media@cirium.com
