《TAIPEI TIMES》Passenger sales at Taiwan carriers soar

Staff writer, with CNA

China Airlines Ltd （CAL, 中華航空）, EVA Airways Corp （長榮航空） and Starlux Airlines Co （星宇航空） reported sales growth for last month as passenger flights continued to boom amid a post-COVID-19 recovery.

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CAL posted NT$14.47 billion （US$471.1 million） in consolidated sales, up 18.01 percent from a year earlier, while revenue from passenger flights surged 1,097.73 percent compared with the same month last year to NT$8.97 billion.

CAL said its passenger business continued to benefit from a growth momentum started in the first quarter, but weakening global demand affected its cargo business, which pulled in NT$4.47 billion in revenue last month.

Cumulative sales for the first five months increased 17.17 percent compared with the same period last year to NT$72.34 billion.

Exploding post-COVID-19 demand for passenger flights looked set to continue into the summer, as more than 80 percent of seats for the period have already been booked, it said.

Starting from July 18, CAL is to launch direct flights to Prague to raise the number of destinations in Europe to six from the current five — Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, Vienna and Rome.

EVA Airways said that passenger flight sales hit a new monthly high of NT$10.86 billion last month, up 1,311.3 percent from a year earlier to boost its consolidated sales by 40.03 percent year-on-year to NT$15.76 billion in the month.

During the January-to-May period, consolidated sales were NT$75.40 billion, up 44.01 percent from a year earlier.

EVA’s passenger flight capacity in the five-month period rose to about 75 percent of the same period in 2019, and could exceed 80 percent of the pre-pandemic level by the end of this year, it said.

The carrier offers 32 flights a week to Europe, more than it did prior to the pandemic, while flights to North America totaled 84 per week, closer to pre-COVID-19 levels, it said.

Meanwhile, the number of flights to destinations in Southeast Asia, 140 per week, has exceeded pre-pandemic levels by 9 percent, it added.

Consolidated sales at Starlux surged 1,489.90 percent from a year earlier to NT$1.71 billion last month after the carrier launched direct flights to Los Angeles in April.

The new route boosted not only revenue in its passenger business, but cargo services sales, it said.

Starlux is planning to add flights to San Francisco at the end of this year and to Seattle in the middle of next year, while it is expected to launch direct flights to New York in 2025 at the earliest.

In Asia, Starlux is on Sept. 1 to launch direct flights to Kumamoto, Japan, from Taoyuan, the airline’s seventh Japanese destination after Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Sapporo, Okinawa and Sendai.

In the first five months, Starlux’s consolidated sales soared 1,546.69 percent from a year earlier to NT$7.75 billion.

新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES