October Airline Traffic Numbers

Recommended Sources

About Travel Industry

BNET Travel provides daily industry trends and news coverage with insights for managers and executives into all aspects of the travel and tourism industry. In addition to detailed airline and hotel company profiles, we bring you industry analysis on new travel and carrier routes, bankruptcies, mergers, tourism figures, investments and a host of other important business issues.

October numbers are in, and traffic has held up well considering how much capacity has been cut. Here are the year over year changes in traffic for US airlines (including regional operations).

Airline	ASMs	RPMs	Load Factor
AirTran	(5.6%)	(2.3%)	+2.7 pts
Alaska	(6.3%)	(4.2%)	+1.6 pts
American	(7.3%)	(9.2%)	-1.6 pts
Continental	(6.7%)	(7.3%)	-0.5 pts
Delta	(4.7%)	(2.2%)	+2.0 pts
JetBlue	(11.1%)	(5.4%)	+4.8 pts
Northwest	(2.0%)	(1.4%)	+0.5 pts
Southwest	2.9%	2.9%	-0.1 pts
United*	(9.9%)	(9.7%)	+0.2 pts
US Airways	(5.0%)	(3.5%)	+1.3 pts

*Does not include regional operations

Tags: Traffic, Brett Snyder, Airline

In addition to writing BNET's travel industry blog, Brett Snyder also pens the award-winning consumer travel blog, Cranky Flier. You can follow him on Twitter under the name crankyflier.

BNET User Analysis

Voice your 2cents

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

1

jefkay

11/18/08 | Report as spam

RE: October Airline Traffic Numbers

Brett, these stats seem bung, or maybe my head is. For example, If JetBlue's ASMs rise by 11.1%, yet bums-in-seats-flown rise by only 5.4%, how does this translate into an INCREASE in load factor of 5-odd points? Surely an increase in capacity tied in with a smaller increase in passenger miles would cause a drop in load factor. Maybe you spent too much time on the road? Educate this pilgrim please. Jef
2

brett snyder

11/18/08 | Report as spam

RE: October Airline Traffic Numbers

jefkay - Sorry, I should have made it more clear that the parentheses mean that it was a decrease and not an increase. So JetBlue's ASMs shrunk by 11.1% but their RPMs only shrunk by 5.4% so load factor went up.