The end of last week was once again dominated by the airline announcements which have in turn made spectacular capacity cuts and cancelled flights in droves. This is what OAGwhich collects flight data from airlines from all over the world, which explains why it is now forced to update the timetables of these carriers on a daily basis. The analyst indicates that his teams are working on a an increasingly evolving market with an unprecedented increase in schedule alterations and a growing volume of data to check and synchronise.
At 16 March, OAG noted that 4.5 million seats had been eliminated in the space of just one week. A week earlier, the increase had been two million seats, but this was due to an increase of three million seats on China's domestic network - a clear sign of the strength of the Chinese market. standardisation in progress of supply and demand - while North America and Europe lost a million seats. Compared with the week of 20 January - when OAG began tracking supply fluctuations with the closure of China to cope with COVID-19, cumulative weekly capacity was down by around 15 % from 20 January. A week earlier, it was still 11%. OAG expects continuous diving and even more so next week, with the data analyst estimating that only the most essential core airlines are likely to remain, due to the large-scale quarantine populations. This week, in fact, we have witnessed the strict confinement of the population of the entireEuropean UnionSaudi Arabia, Malaysia, Norway, the Philippines, Switzerland, Taiwan and New York between other...
In Europe, as at 16 March and compared with the same week in 2019, theItaly recorded a 73.9% drop in air capacity in terms of seats, followed byGermany with 30.2%, the United Kingdom down 19.3%, the France 13.7% and the Netherlands down 8.6%.
L'Asia remained the hardest hit continent, with capacity falling by 80.8% to Hong Kong56.1% in Korea38.7% in Chinafrom 35.5% to Singapore and 19.1% at Japan. By comparison, seat capacity in the United States was down by just 0.5%, but that was before the Trump administration's decision to close its borders to Europe.
According to OAG, the drop in capacity is now reaching new countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. The analyst believes that the situation will last at least until May.
Looking solely at the fall in capacity between the week of 16 March and that of 9 March, the biggest falls in Europe were recorded in Germany (-18.2%), Switzerland (-15.4%), France (-12.1%), Spain (-11.4%) and Turkey (-8.2%).
