Optimism breaks out around the world as the capacity recovery is underway! Four million additional seats week on week may not seem that significant when in normal times global capacity was around the 106 million mark, but after four weeks of moving backwards a 7% week on week increase sounds like a really positive step. And it is, but airlines generally remain cautious about the coming months with a further 39 million seats removed by airlines through to the end of May; it may be the beginning of the meteorological spring, but we still have a long way to go in the recovery.
At the moment April holds has some 309 million seats on sale and May 380 million; looking at previous patterns of capacity cuts then April could end up at around 284 million seats which would be over 131 million more than last April; fingers crossed that the confidence we are currently seeing is not crushed in the next few weeks.
.Chart 1 – Scheduled Airline Capacity by Month
Source: OAG
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