Germany's Air Berlin Plc. (AIBEF.PK) Thursday said that for the month of May, traffic rose 2.3 percent while there has been a drop in number of passengers.
Meanwhile, UK-based low-cost airline easyJet Plc (ESYJY.PK, EZJ.L) posted growth in passengers and load factor for the same period.
Air Berlin's Revenue Passenger Kilometers, or RPK, a measure of traffic, rose 2.3 percent to 4.44 billion, whereas available seat kilometers or ASK, a gauge for capacity, slipped 3.3 percent to 5.39 billion amid flight schedule optimization.
Number of passengers for the month declined 4.3 percent to 2.96 million, while capacity utilization rose 4.5 percentage points to 82.27 percent.
From January to May, Air Berlin's capacity utilization rose 3.4 percentage points to 84.39 percent while passengers dropped 7.4 percent to 11.36 million. RPKs slid 5.9 percent to 17,650.3 million and ASKs declined 9.6 percent to 20,915.3.
easyJet's passengers for May, representing the number of earned seats flown, increased 3.4 percent to 5.61 million from 5.42 million in the previous year.
Since easyJet is a no-refund airline, earned seats for the company include seats that are flown whether or not the passenger turns up. Once a flight has departed, a no-show customer is generally not entitled to change flights or seek a refund.
Earned seats also include seats provided for promotional purposes as well as seats given to staff for business travel.
Load factor advanced 0.1 percentage point to 88.1 percent from 88 percent. This metric represents the number of passengers as a proportion of the number of seats available. No weighting of the load factor is carried out to recognize the effect of varying flight or stage lengths.
For the 12 months ending May, easyJet's passengers increased 5.6 percent to 60.05 million and load factor rose 0.7 percentage points to 89.2 percent.
Air Berlin is climbing 1.6 percent in early morning trade at 2.10 euros. EZJ.L is up 0.4 percent at 1,239.00 pence.
For comments and feedback: editorial@rttnews.com