IATA has announced that international scheduled passenger traffic grew by 6.4% in August, a further indicator that recovery is slowing down in the airline industry.
August demand was down from the 9.5% increase recorded for passenger traffic in July. The August 2010 data is partially distorted by the comparison to August 2009, by which time markets were already expanding rapidly in a post-recession rebound. When adjusted for seasonality, traffic volumes for passenger traffic fell by 1.0% compared to July.
“The rapid improvements in demand that we saw earlier this year are behind us,” said Giovanni Bisignani, IATA’s Director General and CEO. “The slowdown of demand in August is consistent with our forecast for a tougher end to 2010 as government stimulus monies run out without having generated significant improvements in employment. The bounce from re-stocking is over. We do not yet see the strong consumer confidence needed to sustain the expansion with spending.”
IATA also reported that capacity increases in passenger markets are accelerating. Since December 2009, air travel volumes have expanded by 4.3% while capacity has risen by 6%. Passenger load factors remain high (81.6%), but when adjusted for seasonal fluctuation this amounts to a drop of 1.5 percentage points compared to the February 2010 peak.
Global passenger traffic in August was 2% above pre-recession levels of early 2008. Asia-Pacific carriers recorded a demand increase of 6.2%.
While this is still a comparatively strong performance, the region’s airlines carried a similar seasonally adjusted volume of traffic in August as they did in January indicating a levelling-off of the strong gains recorded throughout 2009.
Things are looking up in Europe. European carriers recorded a 5% growth in demand for August when compared to the previous year. Most of the growth that is supporting August’s 5% year-on-year expansion has come during 2010.
North American carriers recorded a 5.3% improvement compared to the previous August. This is a similar pattern to Europe’s carriers with most of the demand improvement having materialized during 2010 and coinciding with a weakening of the US dollar enticing inbound leisure travel and stronger business travel in both directions.
Latin American carriers saw the largest dip in demand growth -from 15% in July to 8.7% in August. The bankruptcy of Mexicana airlines affected about 1 million passengers and slightly distorted these numbers.
Middle East carriers recorded demand that was 12.3% ahead of August 2009 levels. This is down from the 16.5% recorded for July. It was the only region in which capacity expansion of 13.0% outstripped demand.
Africa’s carriers recorded growth of 10.8% slightly ahead of a capacity expansion of 9.0%. Economies in this region are still delivering robust growth.
