Cathay Pacific pledges full summer schedule, normal prices within a year

CATHAY Pacific Airways pledged to run its full flight schedule over Easter and the upcoming summer months without any major cancellations, chief executive officer Ronald Lam said, as he fronted a Hong Kong legislative hearing over a series of flight cuts.

Hong Kong’s dominant airline, which controls budget carrier HK Express, also said it expects air ticket prices to fall to normal levels within a year, Erica Peng, Cathay’s director customer travel, also told the hearing on Friday (Mar 22).

Flight cancellations, high ticket prices, Hong Kong’s slow recovery from Covid and slipping standards of Cathay’s premium offering were also topics raised by lawmakers at the legislative hearing.

Lam said he was “confident” that no cancellations would happen over the Easter and summer travel months and beyond, a time that’s a key period of profitability for the airline. Cathay’s CEO also made an apology to passengers at the legislative session for its earlier cancellation fiasco.

Cathay ultimately axed almost 800 flights from late December to the end of February. The flight cuts stemmed from a shortage of reserve pilots that the airline could call on after a higher-than-expected number of aircrew called in sick and others hit their flying ceiling limits.

Hong Kong’s Civil Aviation Department concluded that Cathay’s planning team “lacked the experience and digital capability to forecast crew resources sufficiently”.

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In response, the airline has delayed when it expects to recover its flight volumes to pre-Covid levels by three months in order to stabilise its flying schedule. The company now plans to recover to 2019 levels by the first quarter of 2025.

Cathay’s mitigation measures include increasing the number of pilots in reserve by almost 40 per cent to up to 110 pilots a day. It is also maintaining special flying allowances for crews during peak travel periods. Schedule planners, meanwhile, will now be able to use better software to see how many aircrew are reaching their flying limits in order to avoid a higher risk of flight cancellations.

Shares in Cathay dropped 0.2 per cent in early trade on Friday, trimming gains for the year to around 7.6 per cent. BLOOMBERG