- 2015: Focus on revenues, slight decline in the number of passengers
- Outlook for 2016: Slight growth planned again
Austrian Airlines carried more than 10.8 million passengers in the period January to December 2015, corresponding to a year-on-year decrease of three percent. The decline reflects target capacity reductions in European flight traffic. This particularly applies to the weak business in Russia and the crisis in Eastern Ukraine. In addition, flight service to long-haul destinations such as Dubai was terminated, and the traditional winter destination of Malé was removed from the flight schedule in the summer.
“In the past year we focused more strongly on revenues than on capacity. In 2016 we plan to generate a slight growth once again“, explains Chief Commercial Officer Andreas Otto. “We have also planned to increase bilateral flight service between Austria and Germany by deploying two additional aircraft. Moreover, we will expand our intercontinental network, and add two new long-haul destinations to our flight offering, namely Shanghai and Havana.”
Revenue passenger kilometers in 2015 fell by 1.3 percent to 18.2 million. Capacity utilization (passenger load factor) was at an average of 78.0 percent, comprising a slight drop of 0.9 percent compared to 2014.
Austrian Airlines carried more than 711,000 passengers in the month of December 2015. This corresponds to a year-on-year decline of 4.5 percent, which can be mainly attributed to earlier aircraft downtimes affecting the long-haul fleet for the purpose of carrying out technical inspections. The underlying reason is Austrian Airlines’ intention to once again deploy its entire long-haul fleet for the early Easter holidays in 2016. The flight offering in December 2015, measured in available seat kilometers, was reduced by 1.8 percent to 1.7 million. Revenue passenger kilometers (RPK) fell by 6.4 percent to 1.2 million. Capacity utilization of the flights was at an average of 72.6 percent, a drop of 3.6 percent from December of 2014.
