We continue to monitor scheduled capacity from airlines around the world. The industry added almost 2 million additional seats for the current week compared to the previous one. The global size of the industry now stands at 56.1 million seats. Still, there is a long way to full recovery, and we can see some signs that the recovery may be gradual.

This week Europe continues to stay in the top seat while North America sees the “stop” sign on the highway to growth.

We continue to monitor the data from the ch-aviation capacities module.

Asia, which was the first region to bring optimism to the industry, kept growing again this week. The airlines added 5% more seats compared to the week before and the region now has 28.6 million seats scheduled to depart between July 20-26. Interestingly, Asia now represents more than half the size of the industry: 28.6 million of 56.1 million seats are scheduled in Asian airports. “China Southern Airlines” and “China Eastern Airlines” have almost 5 million seats combined, what is 17% of the total Asian share. Unsurprisingly, the domestic markets are dominating now: 25.6 million of 28.6 million seats are on domestic flights in Asia (mainly driven by China’s domestic market).

The second-largest region in the industry stays almost flat for the last two weeks. After steep growth for Independence Day-related travel in the USA, capacity growth flattened in North America. The industry added just 0.5% seats compared to a week earlier and now stands at 13.6 million seats. Again, it is mainly driven by the domestic travel – USA domestic market takes 10.9 million seats, with Mexico at 0.8 million and Canada 0.4 million.

Europe continues to lead industry growth – airlines added an additional 4% of seat capacity for the current week totaling 11.1 million. Compared to Asia or North America there is not much domestic travel happening here and 7.5 million seats are scheduled for international flights. Only Russia sees a more significant impact of domestic flying, with 1.2 million domestic seats scheduled while Italy has 0.5 million, and Spain and France with 0.4 million each.

South America is still waiting to start recovery. The industry was close to 1 million seats in South America in the beginning of July, but now is stagnating at around 900,000. More than half of the market now is domestic flying in Brazil, with almost 600,000 seats scheduled there.

Africa is also still looking to gain momentum for the market growth. Airlines slightly dropped the number of seats scheduled from African airports and now the market is at around 1.1 million scheduled seats. Also, we have to keep in mind that 275,000 of those seats are scheduled to depart Canary Islands to domestic Spain and Europe-bound destinations, so mainland Africa is an even smaller market now with 3 North African countries being the largest: Egypt has 126,000 seats scheduled, followed by Morocco (104,000) and Tunisia (75,000).

The recovery in Oceania also stopped and even shows signs of a downward trend again. Airlines have reduced the number of scheduled seats for the last two weeks in a row. The industry now stands at 726,000 seats, with 635,000 of those seats scheduled on domestic flights (330,000 in Australia and 209,000 in New Zealand). International travel from this region stays extremely limited.

We will continue to monitor the situation on capacities and will post on our blog. Follow us here and follow our #chaviationcovid19updates on Linkedin.