I’ve been meaning to talk about IATA’s recent release of premium traffic data for August, which came out last week, but I kept forgetting. Anyway, the decline in premium travel has been hurting airlines a lot during this recession. Sure, there are a small number of premium seats on most aircraft, but they represent a large portion of revenue on a flight due to high fares.
According to IATA, the situation is beginning to improve. The number of passengers in premium cabins was down 23.5% in May, but was down 12% in August. Revenue, however, is another key metric that’s improving – revenues in August were down about 30%, while decreases in past months were over 40%. Granted, comparisons will begin to look rosier soon, as comparisons will begin to be made off of those horrible months when revenues were down over 40%. Hopefully, we will see some kind of positive number when that happens.
Here’s a graph of the latest data from IATA – the purple bars represent volumes, and the blue line represents revenues.
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