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- KL, China travel still seeing impact of MH370, says airport authority
The MH370 incident has continued to impact travelling patterns between Kuala Lumpur and China while the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 tragedy may add further pressure to the airlines' operations, said Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB) in a statement detailing its July traffic numbers.
However, it said “there are signs of improvement in the seat capacity offerings of Kuala Lumpur-China sector”, adding that winter seat capacity offering from October is already in the positive territory, as compared to the current negative trend.
MAHB is also expecting passenger traffic growth to be negatively impacted by various ongoing geopolitical events.
“Increased geopolitical risk due to recent developments in the Middle East and Ukraine could lead to sharply higher oil prices, which may negatively affect consumer sentiment for leisure travel.”
It added that the current Ebola outbreak is also a cause for concern, based on previous experience with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak.
MAS saw a marginally lower passenger traffic of 6.35 million in July this year, down 0.4% year-on-year. The airport operator said international traffic grew by 1.6% year-on-year, while domestic numbers fell by 2.3% in the Ramadan month, when travel is “generally subdued”. Nevertheless, it said that these are still “better than expected”.
Meanwhile, traffic at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) fell 1% year-on-year to 3.81 million passengers in July.
However, MAHB assured investors that the declining traffic numbers at KLIA “is a natural development”, caused mainly by the drop in domestic traffic, which is nothing to worry about.
Notwithstanding, MAHB still expects that its airports would serve 85 million passengers, a 7% increase over its 2013 total numbers by the end of 2014. – The Edge Malaysia, August 13, 2014.
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