21 April 2010

ARC Numbers - A Robust Q1 - Ash Impact

The numbers from ARC are in for March and I have had a chance to review them. I think they look pretty good. What is interesting is that yields are actually running higher than in a long time.

The headline numbers for the month of March/YTD are pretty encouraging:



So now we are seeing some real improvement lets keep fingers crossed that (absent Ash) the market is on the up trend.

BTW I did a quick back of the envelope job on the total number of passengers affected. So far if we assume that the average plane affected has a capacity of 200 passengers (considering the mix of transatlantic large planes and European single aisle craft - this is a good number). Strangely enough my numbers (average of 1.1 million pax a day impacted) differ slightly from IATA. But I suspect that the word impacted means that some passengers were delayed as opposed to outright lost flights. Air4Casts was also using 1.1 million pax a day that I believe is the right number. So using IATA's numbers that is 7.2 Million passengers in 6 days. Ouch.

The US wont be as badly impacted although this is the largest portion of the international non-continental traffic. But still the global number also affects the GDS. Using the global number of 7.2 Million tickets and some very broad numbers - here is the estimate of GDS impact:

7,200,000 Tix total
3,600,000 GDS Tix
8,280,000 Segments
57,960,000 GDS lost Revenue @$7

Ouch - and the majority of that loss was from Amadeus.

Cheers

3 comments:

  1. It would be interesting to know what portion of the "impacted" passengers actually ended in cancelled bookings (and hence lost revenue). GDSs don't loose their revenue when a booking is rebooked on another flight. I guess Worldspan Rapid reprice and Amadeus Ticket Changer must have made up for some of the loss from the remaining cancelled bookings. It will be interesting to see when Amadeus & Travelport report their quarterly figures....

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  2. ccording to a news article in the spanish investment website Cotizalia.es Amadeus has told investors during it's roadshow that the impact of the mass cancelations will be mitigated because it (like other GDSs) charge a small fee for cancellations
    http://foro.cotizalia.com/en-exclusiva/amadeus-supera-efectos-volcan-islandes-comisiones-20100421.html

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  3. In the case of the canceled bookings - there will be an (albeing small) cancellation fee for GDS made re-bookings. However the vast majority of the transactions will be airline rebooks. A significant portion of the airline IT revenue is based on "NET" Boarded passengers so this would NOT be incremental revenue to Amadeus. Unless of course Amadeus has found yet another way to stealth charge their customers which they seem to be pretty good at doing.

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