A new post from OAG – a leading provider of digital flight information, intelligence and analytics for airports, airlines and travel tech companies – found that the Coronavirus has resulted in two-thirds of international capacity to and from China being cancelled.
In less than four weeks, the number of weekly international seats operated from China has fallen by some 1.4 million since the week commencing the 20th January. OAG notes that in comparative terms that reduction in capacity is more than all of the scheduled international capacity planned from France this week.
In an OAG blog post, aviation expert John Grant adds that Japan is the market most impacted by the Coronavirus, with seat capacity falling by 60 percent in four weeks. Flights to and from Thailand have also been hard hit, with nearly 200,000 fewer seats to China than four weeks ago.
“China’s three largest airlines have now cut international capacity by over half a million seats a week compared to four weeks ago,” Grant says in the OAG post, but adds, “Our expectation is that international capacity from China may again fall over the next few days but that we have seen the worst of the cuts with airlines having responded quickly to the virus.”
