AirAsia X Bhd (AAX), the long-haul, low cost airline affiliate of the AirAsia Bhd flew a total of 914,970 passengers in the first quarter, down 15% from 1.08 million passengers in the same quarter in 2014.
According to AAX’s preliminary operating statistics released yesterday, the carrier recorded a load factor of 74% for the first quarter ended March 31, down 12 percentage points from a year ago.
AAX said it had implemented frequency cut on certain routes, mainly China and Australia, and concurrently terminated loss-making routes – Adelaide and Nagoya – to optimise capacity in line with its turnaround strategy.
It said the excess capacity from capacity management had been re-deployed to short-term wet lease and charter operations, to maximise revenue.
AAX said its passenger traffic, as measured by revenue-passenger-KM (RPK), declined 17% year-on-year to 4,431 million in the first quarter from 5.34 billion in the same quarter last year, while available-seat-KM (ASK) capacity decreased by 3% to 6.02 billion.
This was due to capacity management and slowdown in marketing activities during the first three months of this year with respect to the QZ 8501 incident in December 2014.
“Consequently, year-on-year load factor during the quarter dropped 12 percentage points to 74% against 86% in the same period last year.
“Current bookings trends are in line with expectations for a recovery in the second half of 2015,” the carrier said.
In terms of fleet movement, AirAsia took deliveries of two A330-300s on operating lease during the quarter, bringing its total number of A330-300s to 25, compared with 19 a year earlier.
On the associate companies, Thai AirAsia X registered strong loads of 82% for its first quarter, with 155,961 passengers carried, implying continued positive pick-up for the popular routes between Thailand, Japan, and South Korea.
Thai AirAsia X currently operates 3 A330-300s while Indonesia AirAsia X has two A330-300s serving Bali-Taipei and Bali-Melbourne respectively.
