KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (July 1): According to an aviation news source, AirAsia Group Bhd is operating at 19% of its pre-pandemic capacity, with just over 2,000 outward flights booked for the week of July 19, 2021, compared to 10,800 for the same week in 2019. According to Simple Flight, AirAsia’s senior manager of network planning, Andreu Pares Prat, indicated that the performance of each market is heavily influenced by the state of particular countries, vaccination rates, and when borders will reopen.
“Unfortunately, there has been a significant increase in instances in Malaysia. The country is currently under a state of near-complete lockdown, thus travel is extremely limited and only for vital purposes.
“I would say that we are currently at one of the lowest points in history. But, perhaps, we’ll hear something about the lockdown shortly “he stated
The Malaysia unit, according to Pares Prat, is normally a key entity, with Kuala Lumpur serving as the group’s primary airport.
Despite having the greatest domestic network of any country, Malaysia is only operating at 8% capacity compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019, having lost over 2,000 weekly departures and limiting its domestic network to just 21 routes.
As a result, AirAsia Malaysia is now only fourth in terms of planned departures, trailing only AirAsia India, Thai AirAsia, and Indonesia AirAsia, with only Philippines AirAsia and AirAsia X having fewer.
Domestic market recovery is critical for airlines worldwide, according to Pares Prat, as evidenced by AirAsia India’s current position as the company’s leading business due to its wholly domestic network.
He went on to say that because borders are still effectively closed, with domestic departures at 33% of pre-coronavirus levels and international departures at 1%, the business is planning more local departures than international departures.
“We are primarily focused on the home market; overseas business for Malaysia is now quite limited. This is primarily due to the fact that leisure is prohibited globally, and the recipient countries are all essentially closed.
“Because of the borders, we do not fly scheduled international flights in Thailand. The cases are still rather high in the Philippines and Indonesia, but we are witnessing an increase in demand in the Philippines. In some areas, leisure is permitted, therefore we’ve begun to ramp up “he stated
Despite the stringent restrictions imposed by some nations, Pares Prat remains optimistic, citing AirAsia’s capacity to ramp up swiftly.
“When there have been no constraints, we have been able to ramp up very quickly in domestic markets across the network; we are quite responsive to that. We install capacity as soon as possible, and we observe good load factors and rates as a result “Added he.
AirAsia’s share price fell half a sen (0.56 percent) to 88.5 sen at 12.30pm, giving the company a market capitalization of around RM3.47 billion./n
