Never to shy to publish their operational figures also when they are not showing growth, Brussels Airlines issued their figures for April, the first full month after the terror attacks on Belgium and its hub Brussels Airport: https://www.aviation24.be/airlines/brussel ... -march-22/
The operational challenges, together with the commercial impact of the attacks, translated into a passenger decrease, mainly due to the negative growth recorded during the first half of the month. As the month progressed, the passenger evolution improved however, but too late to curb the trend.
Figures for May will show a further return to normality and growth.
Good to see them keeping the habit of publishing figures on a monthly basis: must be they are confident they will not have to post this kind of bad publicity for much longer. At present they can buy goodwill with the stakeholders (some of which are involved in compensation payment discussions with them, I am sure), but that won't last forever of course, so as said before: May should ideally see a gradual return to normality.
Given the disruptive impact of the attacks on Brussels, it's IMHO equally interesting to also compare these figures of April against those of March, rather than to only compare them against the same month last year.
Whereas I considered March a relatively 'easy' month in the sense that their offer was somehow and almost automatically adjusted to customer demand due to the full closure of their home airport, April must have been a much more difficult month to manage for them since it is where they had to steer both capacity as well as demand themselves.
Taking ASK as a rough figure of their output, it shows they have clearly managed to ramp up production quickly to top that of April last year even: taking into account the fact the airport of BRU was closed for several days and suffered from capacity restrictions for the rest of the month, that is quite an achievement and indicative of the fact they are working very closely with the airport to get first served by them.
I remember BRU posted it's April figures and showed the airport running at just half of its normal volume, in contrast... (it's just a small side note in this discussion, but their 2016 market share at BRU will have taken good benefit from it)
Taking RSK as a rough figure of customer demand, it shows demand is lagging the offer, but not by a lot.
After an event like the attacks on BRU, confidence obviously needs to be rebuilt, so you need to put the offer out in the market before demand will return, and clearly this has happened relatively quickly.
Too bad the recovery must have been further impacted by a 2 day ATC strike as well as the slow lifting of the very strict security screenings at the terminal entry, or that ASK vs. RSK gap would have been much smaller than it still shows.
Anyway, even with all of that, the difference vs. March -which I remember did contain 2/3rds of a normal situation as well as a the 'ease' of a full closure- is remarkably small! Despite the unpredictability and volatility of relaunching at BRU, they've managed to keep their loadfactor at 2/3rds full over the full month (only very slighly lower than in March), which is not exactly a dramatic figure when it's just for a brief period of the year.
They also mention that the second half of the month was much better than the first (makes sense) and sound fairly confident that May will thus be much better, something which is highly likely indeed given capacity of the airport is back to almost normal while there are no more commercially damaging extra long waiting times, so provided there are no other disruptive events like (ATC) strikes, May should indeed be the first month where there have an operationally normal environment, possibly already accompanied by normal operational figures too.
Very interesting to have them publish all these data, as it allows for some good analysis and to bring some sense to often hysterical comments about the consequences of the attacks for them. As I've said before: they most certainly constitute a huge opportunity loss, but they seem to do a very good job at containing the financial costs during their return to normality, something which seems to be well underway and fairly quickly too.
nice.
