May 11th - The busiest day of the year for the number of available airline seats revealed
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2022
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
Friday 12 August will be the busiest day of the year for the number of available airline seats, a leading analyst has predicted.
John Grant, chief analyst at OAG, calculates that 16.1 million seats are on offer worldwide for that date at present. The exact number is likely to change as airlines adjust schedules, with an overall picture of 0.6 per cent of capacity removed every week. The busiest day for aviation before the coronavirus pandemic was also the second Friday in August: 9 August 2019, with the data analyst Cirium calculating 17 million passengers took off worldwide.
The actual number of airline travellers on 12 August 2022 will be well down on that figure, because around one in five seats is likely to be empty – giving a figure of about 13 million passengers.
In 2021, says Mr Grant, “the busiest day was a very unusual 17 December”. The last-but-one Friday before Christmas had 12.5 million seats on offer, with around nine million passengers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast and bringing you the latest news on travelling. |
| 0:09.4 | Today, I've got an interesting forecast. I can exclusively reveal that worldwide, the busiest day of the year, is likely to be three months from now. Friday, the 12th of August, |
| 0:27.0 | to be absolutely precise. The reason I know this, or the reason I predict this, is because I read |
| 0:33.5 | the excellent coverage by John Grant, who's the schedule analyst, the chief analyst at |
| 0:40.2 | OAG. They look at all the airline flights around the world. He calculates that 16.1 million |
| 0:49.1 | seats will be on offer worldwide for that day. Now, the exact number is probably going to change |
| 0:57.6 | because that's what happens. The airlines will adjust their schedules and in general, airlines are |
| 1:05.1 | putting on, or they're reducing the capacity that they offer by about, well, 0.6% a week. You might think, well, that's |
| 1:14.7 | really odd. I thought things were supposed to be getting better. But airlines are always saying, |
| 1:19.7 | oh, yeah, we've got all these plans. I mean, British airways canceling quite a lot at the moment. |
| 1:25.3 | And just because there are 16.1 million seats doesn't mean we'll be anywhere near |
| 1:31.1 | what we think is the busiest day before the coronavirus pandemic. This was the second Friday in |
| 1:39.5 | August in 2019, the 9th of August to be precise. And And another data analyst, Sirium, says that 17 million people |
| 1:48.4 | took off worldwide. Now, assuming 80% load factor, which is probably fairly accurate for the 12th of |
| 1:56.9 | August this year, that busiest day, you're expecting around 13 million passengers, so still |
| 2:03.9 | significantly down. Worth also saying the busiest last year in 2021, what a weird year, was |
| 2:11.5 | actually the last but one Friday before Christmas. On that day, there were 12.5 million seats, so very significantly |
| 2:23.1 | fewer than there will be on the 12th of August. In other news in his blog, Mr Grant says that |
| 2:31.7 | after a few days, weeks edging ever closer to 90 million seats a week worldwide, we're finally there. |
| 2:38.2 | We've broken it, 90.7 million seats. |
| 2:42.1 | But while there are some parts of the world which are doing really well, Central and West Africa, Central America, Upper South America, which is effectively |
| 2:54.8 | kind of Colombia, Ecuador, that sort of area, they're up 6%. |
... |
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