During the summer season, demand has increased and more than one million passengers flew with SAS in August. It is about the same level as in July, but an increase of almost 52 percent compared to the same month last year.
Slightly more passengers flew with SAS in August than in July. During the eighth month of the year, 1,087,000 passengers flew, compared with 1,079,000 passengers in July. The increase from July to August is almost one percent, while capacity was marginally lower. On the other hand, capacity was 65 percent higher than the same month in 2020. The total cabin factor for SAS in August ended at 61 percent, which is in line with July.
“Travel restrictions remain and everyone at SAS does everything we can to make it as easy as possible for our customers to travel. We continue to open new lines when restrictions and demand allow. But there is still great uncertainty about the development of the pandemic and this has a negative effect on the entire aviation industry. Flexibility will be crucial during the recovery phase, in order to be able to act quickly on changes in demand, ”says Anko van der Werff, President and CEO of SAS.
The largest increase in August compared with the same month last year was SAS’s intercontinental traffic. Measured in revenue-generating passenger kilometers (RPK), intercontinental traffic increased by 430 percent, while the development for RPK on routes within Europe and domestic in Sweden, Denmark and Norway was 129 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Domestic traffic has withstood the pandemic best and hence the increase in this segment is least because there is the least recovery to be found. At the same time, travel intercontinental and within Europe has increased during the summer when the number of vaccinations increases and travel restrictions decrease.
The passenger figures for August also show that SAS has regained 39.1 percent of the number of passengers it had in August 2019. This can be compared with other Nordic airlines in August where Finnair had 19.6 percent of the passenger number back, Norwegian had 22.5 percent back while Icelandair performed best with 44.8 percent of the number of passengers back of what it had in August 2019, which CHECK-IN.DK writes about.
(Photo: Bene Riobó)
Credit: Simon Ericson & Flyg24Nyheter
Original article (SE): https://flyg24nyheter.com/2021/09/08/over-en-miljon-passagerare-flog-med-sas-i-augusti/
