Every week for the last two years we have been providing a weekly update on the impact of Covid-19 on scheduled airline capacity around the world. Throughout that time, providing the air travel ecosystem with essential data has had many ups and downs, twists and turns.
This week is no exception as airlines remain spooked by the latest wave of Covid-19 and have once again been cutting capacity with another 18 million seats removed from sale through to the end of March, resulting in over 51 million seats being ‘lost’ from the first quarter of this year. That sounds like a lot of seats, and it is, but in context – this week’s cuts were only another 1.2% of the planned capacity for the first quarter, so it could have been a lot worse!
However, there are some signs of hope in this week’s numbers, and even more hope as we peek forward into the second quarter of the year, with slightly more capacity added back for April. Are these the first signs of another recovery?