Higher Indian traffic helps Finnair improve load factor

HELSINKI - Helped by a 27-percent growth in Asian traffic, led mainly by higher passenger movement to and from India, Nordic carrier Finnair Wednesday reported an overall 19-percent jump in such demand during March.

“Due to successful capacity management, Finnair aircraft are flying fuller than before. The improvement of 12 percentage points in load factor is exceptional,” the carrier’s main spokesperson Christer Haglund said in a statement.

Asian traffic grew in March by 27 per cent, with a total of 114,000 passengers. The load factor in Asia was also good at nearly 87 percent, which helped the airline’s overall carriage to jump to 80 percent, he added.

According to Kari Stolbow, the airline’s director for South Asia, the passenger load factor on the Helsinki-New Delhi sector was an impressive 91 percent in January and 84 percent in February.

“These are encouraging signs for us. Our strategy of keeping the fares competitive, despite the difficult year that 2009 was, seems to have paid off,” Stolbow said.

“In March, we were pleasantly surprised when we found a passenger load factor as high as 97 percent during the first 15 days,” he said. “So the first logical step now would be to make the Helsinki-Delhi service a seven-day operation.”

The carrier currently flies six days a week to and out of the Indian capital. While there is no service from Helsinki to the national capital on Mondays, there is no flight out of here on Tuesdays.