JAL Group traffic results for 2009 summer vacation period

Japan Airlines Group announced its international and domestic passenger traffic results for the Japanese summer vacation period that stretched from August 7 to August 16 this year.

The international passenger traffic on JAL Group flights during the 10-day period is 347,209, down by 4.5% on the same period last year. However, the number of passengers that departed Japan for China, Guam and Europe in particular, showed an improvement of 31.1%, 3.1% and 1.4% respectively when
compared to the same period last year.

With the exception of routes to Hawaii and Guam, on which capacities were down by 2% and 1% respectively, capacity was down by more than 10% on all other international routes due to either reductions in scheduled flight frequency or the switch to smaller-sized aircraft from the beginning of FY2009. This contributed to a drop in the number of available seats on the Group's international network by 16.2% compared to last year. JAL also operated only half the number of extra flights it operated during the summer vacation period last year; 26 extra international flights were operated this year to such destinations as Alaska, Honolulu, Latvia and Palau. 
The load factors on Hawaii, transpacific, Europe and Taiwan routes exceeded 90%, and the load factor on all the other international routes from Japan were above 70%. This led to a high overall load factor of 84.5% on international routes and which represents a rise of 10.4 percentage points versus previous year.

For domestic traffic, the JAL Group carried 1,312,717 domestic passengers during this period which is a 7.6% decline compared to last year's result. Seat supply on domestic routes is 3.4% lower than the same period last year and the load factor is 70.5%. 73 additional flights on domestic routes in Japan were operated
during this summer vacation period, to such key vacation destinations as Okinawa, Sapporo and Kagoshima.

Source: Transportweekly