Finnair reported a second straight quarterly operating profit on Wednesday as the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns eases on its key Asian business, and said it looked forward to potentially “huge” demand from the Chinese market. China’s easing of some travel restrictions in December had come “earlier and more suddenly” than the company had predicted, Topi Manner, CE of the Finnish flag carrier, told an earnings call. Its shares hit their highest intraday level in a year. “We expect that the demand ... eventually will be sizable, even huge, to and from China (and) will materialise with a bit of a time lag,” Manner said, noting the country would first need to sort out passport and visa issues. Manner also said the higher ticket prices implemented by airlines both domestically and globally due to soaring fuel costs might not be easing even as oil prices come down. “There is a prospect of a future in which air fares will not fall from their current level, but will instead be subject to long-term upward pressure,” Manner said. Finnair, whose pre-pandemic strategy relied on Asian routes and its short fly-times over Siberia, saw its volumes slump due to lockdowns and then the closure of Russian airspace after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. “With the fading impacts of the pandemic, and now China being open, we expect that normal seasonality will return to our business”, Manner added, noting this meant Finnair would likely post an operating loss for Q1. In Q4, 31.2% of its passenger revenue came from Asian traffic, versus 41.1% in the same period in 2019. Finnair expects to operate at 80% to 85% of its pre-pandemic 2019 capacity this year, measured in available seat kilometers (ASK), but Manner said this hinged on market developments and the pace of recovery in China travel.<br/>
oneworld
Cathay Pacific carried more than a million passengers in January – for the first time in almost three years – as the airline works to increase capacity “as much as possible” in the coming months following the easing of travel restrictions. Calling its January traffic results a “positive start” to the new year, Cathay’s newly-minted commercial and customer chief Lavinia Lau says the airline saw demand spike for flights between Mainland China and Hong Kong, with the Lunar New Year holidays at the end of the month providing a boost to travel demand. China on 8 January scrapped most of its ‘zero-Covid’ restrictions for travel, including the need for quarantine on arrival. The Hong Kong-based carrier flew 1.03m passengers in January, almost 29% more compared to December 2022. The figure is also a significant uptick against the 25,000 passengers Cathay carried in January 2022. Traffic significantly jumped year on year - 38-times higher - while capacity rose eighteen-fold. Lau adds that the airline’s January capacity was 18% higher month on month. In its outlook, Cathay expects demand to grow further in the coming months, with the airline looking to ramp up Mainland China operations to about 100 weekly flights to 14 points. Says Lau: “Looking at February and beyond, we are working hard to increase our passenger flight capacity as much as possible over the coming months, especially in the lead-up to the Easter holiday. Demand for flights to and from the Chinese Mainland, both for point-to-point and connecting traffic via Hong Kong, is expected to grow and we are endeavouring to provide more options for our customers as quickly as feasible.” <br/>