ETIHAD Airways had its busiest month ever with more than 616,000 passengers flying during July, a nine per cent increase on passenger numbers for July 2008.
On July 31, a record 21,640 passengers with a load factor of 90.3 per cent, flew with the Abu Dhabi based airline, making it the airline’s busiest day in its five year history. The last week of July saw an average of more than 20,500 passengers fly aboard its planes each day.
July also saw Etihad’s 900 weekly flights – a 20 per cent increase on the number of weekly flights operated in July 2008 – fly at an average of 88 per cent full across first, business and economy cabins.
James Hogan, Etihad Airways’ chief executive, said, “The record breaking passenger numbers we have experienced in July demonstrate that, despite the current economic challenges, Etihad continues to attract high volumes of traffic across all three cabins on our global network of more than 50 destinations.”
“Whilst we expected July to be busy we are delighted to have beaten our previous records,” he said. “We now look forward to building upon this for the remainder of the summer holiday period and into the holy month of Ramadan.”
Etihad’s flights to the Asia-Pacific region and also North America in July recorded seat factors averaging more than 86 per cent. Within Europe, loads exceeded 82 per cent and in the Middle East region it was 77 per cent.
The airline will launch non-stop flights from Abu Dhabi to Chicago and Cape Town in September.