Austrian Airlines Group welcomed more passengers onto its flights than ever before, with 10,119,773 passengers carried from January to December 2005.This represented an increase of 7.6 % compared to 2004. This record performance enabled the Austrian Airlines Group to achieve a traffic result - measured in revenue passenger kilometers on scheduled services (RPK) - which was up by 7.9 % on the comparable figure for the previous year, while the figure for available seat kilometers (ASK) rose by 5.5 % compared to the previous year. The resulting cumulative passenger load factor on scheduled services, at 73,8 %, was 1.7 percentage points above the previous year’s figure. A historic “all-time-high” overall load factor for scheduled and charter services was achieved by an increase of 1.3 percentage points to 74.1 %.

The Austrian Airlines Group also continued to register robust traffic growth for the month of December itself, continuing the uninterrupted trend towards strong growth since May 2005. The figure for the number of passenger kilometers sold and therefore productive on scheduled services, which is used to define revenue (RPK) - increased by 16.7 % compared to last year, while available seat kilometers rose by 7.5 %. The load factor on scheduled services in December 2005 was 5.8 percentage points up on December 2004, reaching 73.1 %. With an overall rise in the number of passengers carried of 11.8 % compared to the same period in 2004, the Austrian Airlines Group also produced a dynamic increase in December, transporting a total of 693,471 passengers on scheduled charter flights.

Vagn Soerensen, Chief Executive Officer of the Board of Management, made the following statement on the Austrian record traffic results: “With our disproportionately high level of traffic growth and load factors, we are also disproportionately responsible for the strong growth at the Vienna hub in 2005.
“Our Focus East specialisation strategy is a turbo charger for the entire region and the traffic flow to and via Vienna. We are now really beginning to develop the full potential of our network to the east, which will not reach the limits of its maximum wingspan for some time yet.
“As a result of these factors, we have created a secure take-off position for ourselves for 2006, all the more so since advance bookings for the first months of the 2006 correspond to this positive trend. Based upon our Focus East programme we are represented in top-positions - from Eastern Europe, via Middle to Far East - in today«s fastest growing economic regions.”
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