Air Macau, the city’s flagship airline, has been buoyed by rapidly rebounding demand for cross-border travel, and has decided to increase the frequency of flights to key mainland cities in May, to maximize the gains arising from the coming peak season: the May Day Holiday.
In response to the Times’ query, the Air Macau spokesperson confirmed that the airline has increased the flight frequencies of its three China routes in May.
This include routes to Pudong, Shanghai and Beijing, set to increase from two return trips per day to three. The Qingdao route will also be expanded from three return trips per week to four.
The airline’s move to augment the flight capacity in May is considered a wise tactic: as the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) is expecting the tourist arrivals to hit a record high during May Day holiday from the figures recorded since the coronavirus outbreak.
The booking data provided by Trip.com, the largest online travel agency in China, also confirms that a massive quantity of pent-up travel demand from Chinese holidaymakers is set to be released during the five-day May Golden Week, with around 200 million Chinese tourists forecast to make leisure trips.
As of April 14, air ticket bookings for the coming May Day Holiday through Ctrip, Trip.com’s booking platform, saw a noticeable uptick of 23%, even compared to the same holiday period in 2019, a time regarded as the pre-pandemic era before Covid-19 hit the world.
In a separate filing, Trip.com also noticed a promising turnaround in the tourism business during the holiday in Macau. According to data assembled by the group on April 8, the total number of bookings for Macau travel products during the May Day holiday had risen by 20 compared to the same period in 2019. The search volume for flights in and out of Macau also climbed by over 140% compared to the previous month.
The majority (66.9%) of shares in Air Macau were bought by China’s flag carrier Air China Ltd, which also holds shares in other subsidiary airlines such as Beijing Airlines, Shenzhen Airlines, Dalian Airlines and more.
With its business crippled by Covid-19, which forced international travel to come to a standstill in 2020, Air Macau registered an astonishing 82.4% year-on-year drop in air traffic revenue in 2020, totaling RMB636 million.
This figure was provided in the annual financial report for 2020, published by its parent company Air China. It also stated that the total number of passengers using Air Macau’s service in 2020 stood at only 545,900, showing a sharp decline of 85.1% from 3.67 million in 2019.
The average passenger load factor for Air Macau reached 51.68% in 2020, representing a significant slowdown from 79.07% in 2019.
Despite the significant loss posted last year, Air Macau’s decision to extend China routes in the coming month suggests that its business is gradually returning to a trajectory of growth.
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