From 6 December, Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific will not only increase the frequency of Hong Kong to Perth flights from three to five frequencies a week, but also will upgrade the services to larger Boeing 777-300ER aircraft in place of the Airbus A350-900.
The aircraft upgrade represents a total of 61,152 additional seats between Perth and Hong Kong per year and more than 4,500 tonnes of additional cargo capacity.
Until 6 December, Cathay will continue to operate three flights a week to Perth with the A350.
Many passengers originating in Perth connect in Hong Kong to destinations throughout North Asia including mainland China, South Korea and Japan, as well as options through to Europe and North America.
From 6 December 2023, CX171 will operate on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It departs from Hong Kong at 1515 and arrives in Perth at 2250.
The CX170 return flight will operate on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It departs from Perth at 0010 and arrives in Hong Kong at 0740.
Cathay Pacific carried a total of 1,548,571 passengers in June, an increase of 931.9 per cent compared with June 2022.
Passenger load factor increased by 20.7 percentage points to 87.7 per cent, while capacity, measured in available seat kilometres (ASKs), increased by 379.6 per cent year on year.
In the first six months of 2023, the number of passengers carried increased by 2,230 per cent against a 1,111 per cent increase in capacity, as compared with the same period for 2022.
Earlier this month, Cathay chief customer and commercial officer, Lavinia Lau, said: “We are pleased to see that our travel business continued to perform well in June. We reached a new milestone on 25 June when we surpassed the 60,000 mark for passengers carried in a single day for the first time since the pandemic. We continued to increase our capacity and frequencies to cater for the strong demand for travel.
“Our long-haul routes popular for student traffic, such as North America, the UK and Australasia, all saw good demand, with load factors on flights to Hong Kong averaging about 90%. As a result, overall passenger load factor was very high in June at 87.7%.