Airlines suffer from low prices, overseas flights

The bleeding aviation industry in China has never been so desperate for a boom since the virus swept the world for more than eight months, and the recent eight-day holidays have given a boost to the industry’s recovery.

The holiday data, no matter if it’s measured by daily passenger or daily flight volume, is encouraging as their performance has returned to normal. However, the airlines, which seem to be busy carrying more passengers than previous months, are still finding it hard to see positive revenue results, amid low ticket prices and limited overseas flights.

Information provider VariFlight said the flight volume in the past eight days showed an average growth of over 12 percent compared to last year.

Although it is much better than their foreign peers, whose planes are grounded at the airports, this is not the whole story of China’s recovery battle.

Qunar.com data showed that routes from Beijing to popular destinations such as Chongqing, Hangzhou and Xiamen were advertised at almost 50 percent off halfway through the holidays. This price trend has not recovered, with the cheapest tickets, such as from Beijing to Chongqing, hitting 260 yuan ($38) next week, 86 percent lower than usual.

“Although the market is recovering, the airlines still have a long way to go, as ticket prices are slowest to recover, compared to the recovery of passenger traffic and the number of flights,” Lin Zhijie, a market watcher said. He attributed the low fare to the oversupply of domestic flights.

Experts also warned that limited overseas travel is still casting a shadow on the carriers’ revenues for the second half of the year, as the eight-day holidays still failed to drive overseas travel, and the number of international and regional flights operated by Chinese mainland airlines continued to hover at a tenth of last year’s level.