With a total of 817,312 people travelling on its scheduled and charter services, the Austrian Airlines Group carried 21.6 % more passengers in May 2004 than in the comparable period the previous year. A large proportion of this rise appeared on the Group’s long-haul services, which reported a record increase of 57.5 %.
Chief Executive Officer Vagn Soerensen made the following comment on the traffic statistics for May: “Even before we launched the expansion in our services to Australia at the beginning of June, we managed to record above-average passenger figures on long-haul flights to North America and Asia - despite the reduced availability of the previous year - on the basis of our marketing campaigns. Although the month of May stands out particularly strongly with an increase of 57.5 %, the overall rise over the first five months of the year was a highly significant 36.9 % - enabling us to carry over half a million passengers on long-haul services by the end of May for the first time in our history.”
Availability on scheduled services, where measured in seat kilometers, increased by 32.9 % in May, while the number of revenue passenger kilometers rose by 37.6 %. This produced a load factor of 69.1 %, a rise of 2.4 percentage points.Ê
The cumulative passenger figures on scheduled and charter services from January-May 2004 stood at 3,524,844 passengers, a 15.4 % increase on the same period in 2003. The company disposed of its availability on scheduled services more successfully than last year: while availability seat kilometers rose by 15.1 %, revenue passenger kilometers grew by considerably more at 26.0 %. The overall passenger load factor for the first five months of 2004 was 70.8 %, a striking 6.1 percentage points up on the figure for the previous year.ÊÊÊ
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