Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways will resume flights to Chennai and Colombo in February 2024. The airline last offered regular service to both cities pre-pandemic.
Cathay is gradually rebuilding its network and earlier this week said that its recovery remains well on track as demand for travel holds strong across its network.
Cathay recently relaunched flights to Johannesburg and noted “a very positive response” from the market.
“Travel demand remained strong as we entered the second month of the traditional peak summer season in August. We continued to increase our flight frequencies to cater for the strong demand. Our newly resumed flights serving Johannesburg received a very positive response, in particular among business and leisure travellers flying to Hong Kong and beyond,” said Cathay Pacific’s chief customer and commercial officer, Lavinia Lau.
“In the first half of the month, we saw consistently high demand for leisure travel from Hong Kong and the rest of the Greater Bay Area to various short-haul destinations. We also saw increased demand for outbound travel from Japan to Hong Kong and onward destinations in Asia and Europe in mid-August, coinciding with the Obon holiday period in Japan. Meanwhile in the latter part of the month, there was a notable increase in student travel to Canada, the US and the UK from Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland ahead of the start of the new school year,” Lau noted.
“Looking ahead first at our travel business, continued demand for student travel to the UK in particular will provide a good boost in September, while overall the outlook for the rest of 2023 looks promising. We continue to add more flights for our customers, in particular to and from the Chinese Mainland where we are currently operating about 170 return flights per week to 16 airports in 15 cities,” said Lau.
Cathay Pacific’s traffic figures for August 2023 show that the oneworld carrier surpassed the milestone of carrying more than 10 million passengers in the first eight months of 2023.
In August, the airline carried a total of 1.8 million passengers, an increase of more than 600 per cent compared with August 2022.