Virgin Blue sees rise in domestic passengers

Virgin Blue has reported a rise in domestic traffic during July, although faster capacity growth resulted in a small fall in load factor.

Compared to July 2009, the carrier saw an increase of 4.7 per cent in domestic passengers, resulting in a 3.9 per cent increase in revenue passenger kilometres. Capacity increased by 5.5 per cent, resulting in load factor falling from 79.9 per cent to 78.7 per cent.

International services were up strongly, with passenger volumes increasing by 21.8 per cent, while RPKs increased by 49.4 per cent as capacity increased by 31.4 per cent. Revenue load factor recorded a rise of 10.2 percentage points to 86 per cent.

Overall, the Virgin Blue Group recorded a 7.3 per cent increase in passengers to 1.63 million, which helped to push its overall load factor up by 3.1 percentage points to 81.6 per cent.