During July, more than 2.8 million passengers travelled with SAS, which is a record number for July and a slight increase compared to the same month last year. At the same time, SAS had a significant improvement in operational performance as well as a favourable development of yield.
SAS traffic had a positive development during July, during which scheduled capacity increased with over 2% and the number of passengers increased by 0.2%. Regularity increased with 1.8 percentage points to 99.6% and punctuality increased by 4.4 percentage points to 72.4%. During the summer season, the demand for leisure travel is high and we shift our capacity toward leisure-oriented routes. Compared to last year demand has been high on domestic and European routes, while slightly lower on intercontinental traffic. Currency adjusted yield continues to develop favourably, increasing 1.5%.
– We are pleased that the number of passengers that chose to travel with SAS is at a record level for the month of July. It shows that our strategy of shifting capacity toward leisure-oriented routes during the peak season is taking us in the right direction and that we have a competitive customer offering. Since last year we have made several improvements to ensure a stable operational performance. Our efforts have paid off, resulting in significantly improved punctuality and regularity compared to last year. Also, the renewal of our fleet towards more fuel-efficient aircraft results in lower CO2 emissions, in July a new A330E was delivered and we were able to phase-out an older and less efficient A340 aircraft in our long-range fleet, says Rickard Gustafson, CEO of SAS.