China's civil aviation market is experiencing an accelerated recovery on the back of a rising number of flights, with domestic summertime ticket bookings surging nearly 300% in the third week of June from the previous week and market watchers predicting that China is witnessing a turning point as more cities are moving to lift travel restrictions. Increased demand has also driven up prices. The average price of domestic passenger flight tickets increased to CNY685 in June from CNY494 in March, an increase of about 39%, qunar.com told the Global Times. Demand for air travel is rising, sparked by relaxed travel restrictions across a number of provinces and regions such as Qinghai, Ningxia and Hubei on the eve of the traditional summer holiday season.
More airlines are also resuming international flights to and from China, and it is likely that July will see the biggest number of international flights since pandemic restrictions were placed on international air travel in early 2020. Air China said that it will resume a number of international flights to cities in Europe and Asia. Other Chinese carriers, including China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Hainan Airlines and Xiamen Airlines, have announced the resumption of international routes or increased frequencies. China Eastern and Shanghai Airlines will fly 22 international routes per week in July, including from Shanghai to New York. Hainan Airlines expects to add routes including Beijing to Moscow and Beijing-Tokyo.
Japan's All Nippon Airways said it will resume flights from Beijing to Tokyo from July 11. It is the carrier's first flight to Beijing after being suspended for more than two years. Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has resumed passenger flights between Abu Dhabi and Beijing since suspending flights on March 23, 2020. The regular weekly service will commence on July 6, and will be operated by a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. The airline claimed it would be the first regular direct international passenger flight to recommence services to Beijing. Data from industry information provider VariFlight sent to the Global Times said that 748 inbound passenger flights landed in China from June 1 to 27, with an average of about 28 flights per day. The average daily flight volume increased by 17% month-on-month, and the top three airports are in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xiamen.
Huang Xingwen, Vice General Manager of Shanghai-based Spring Airlines, predicted that the number of domestic flights would return to pre-epidemic levels in the middle of July, as the number of passengers keeps growing. Currently, the company is operating 8 to 10 flights a day at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport and 4 to 5 flights at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, well below pre-epidemic numbers, but flight numbers will quickly recover in the future as the summer travel peak approaches. Major airports in many Chinese cities have seen steady operations. Daily takeoffs and landings have remained above 400 since May, with the number of daily passengers exceeding 40,000, according to an official from Chengdu Shuangliu Airport in Sichuan province. Other airports, such as in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, also said that the daily passenger volume has recovered to 60% of normal levels prior to the recent Covid-19 outbreaks.
As Hainan relaxes travel restrictions for people from low-risk areas in Shanghai and Beijing, the number of passengers flying to the province over the past weekend from June 25 to 26 was almost double that of the previous weekend. The number of tickets to Sanya increased by 93% from the previous weekend, to Haikou by 92%, and tickets from Shanghai to Sanya saw a near 1.5-fold increase. Hotel bookings across the country over the last weekend of June exceeded those in the same period of 2019. Hotel bookings in Changsha, Hunan province, increased by 58% over the same period in 2019, while Sanya had almost returned to 2019 levels. Data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) showed that the number of flights has continued to decline since March and that daily flight volume at its lowest point was only about 18% of the normal period before the epidemic.
With the implementation of several rounds of support from the government and the improvement of the national epidemic situation since May, the operation of the civil aviation sector has gradually recovered, and the pace of recovery has picked up in June, when the number of single-day flights increased from 6,489 at the beginning of the month to 10,609, and single-day passenger traffic increased from 445,000 to 896,000, the Global Times reports.
