Travel curbs leave Asian airlines' recovery lagging US peers

Asia's airlines are struggling to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, with the biggest operators reporting significant losses -- again -- for the July-September quarter, reflecting the region's prolonged travel curbs. Nearly two years since the onset of the pandemic, Western countries now lead the world's recovery from the crisis, with major US airlines logging net profits in the quarter. But in Asia, strict safety measures to limit the spread of the delta variant continued to curtail demand for domestic and international travel in core markets, from China to Japan to Southeast Asia. Airlines are streamlining their operations, hoping to speed the return to profit if recent reopening moves by local governments unleash pent-up demand. On Thursday, Singapore Airlines reported a net loss of 428m Singapore dollars ($316m) for the three months through September, marking the seventh consecutive quarterly loss. Its operational passenger capacity was 32% of pre-pandemic levels as of September. The city-state's flagship carrier does not have domestic routes so its earnings most heavily reflect the weak cross-border travel in Asia, which is generally seen as more risk-averse than the West. Meanwhile, domestic flights in China suffered from the government's zero-tolerance strategy for COVID outbreaks, which sparked strict community lockdown and travel curbs. Despite schools' summer break and mid-Autumn festival holidays, outbreaks in several provinces in southern and eastern China dampened travel demand. China's three big airlines, which each earned about 70% of revenue from domestic routes before the pandemic, all recorded net losses during the July-September quarter. China Eastern and China Southern logged net losses of 2.95b yuan ($460m) and 1.43b yuan, respectively. Air China reported a net loss of 3.5b yuan. The losses were "mainly due to the combined effects of the sporadic outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rising aviation fuel price and the fluctuation in [the] exchange rate," Air China noted in its filing. In comparison, the three airlines all marked net profits in the same quarter in 2019. Story has more.<br/>