Is Cathay Pacific a Chinese airline?

To what extent does China mainland contribute to the Hong Kong carrier’s network?

Hong Kong is one of my favourite cities. In the summer it is far too hot and the air stinks of sweat, stale rice and old roast duck. But I love it anyway.

Back when I was 18 I went there for a spot of summer fun after finishing my exams at school. It is fair to say that I grew up in Hong Kong and I still have a soft spot for the amazing city for that reason alone.

Asia’s world city has many attractions. Colin Aitchison and the China Coast Jazz Men groove on down at Ned Kelly’s Last Stand. The Hong Kong Club serves slabs of tasty roast beef from the carvery for a bargain HK$ 170 (£17.33) a plate. And the team at Kam’s Roast Goose over in Wan Chai always give me a warm welcome.

Star Ferries chug across the harbour, trams climb up and down the Peak, and Cathay Pacific jets roar overhead. A short metro ride away in Sha Tin, a New Territories town, Butterfly Engineering build their cool seats (see article).

I stay at the YMCA, right next door to the stunning but also stunningly expensive Peninsula, but much better value and still within stumbling distance of Ned Kelly’s. Yes sir, Hong Kong is a great place to be for me.

In the next summer schedule, Hong Kong’s flag carrier Cathay Pacific will operate 1,259 missions a week from Hong Kong (2,518 return flights). Their wholly-owned low-cost subsidiary Hong Kong Express will operate 268 missions (536 return flights). The maps below show which destinations are served by each aircraft.

Hong Kong Express operate a fleet of single-aisles. Their network and the extent to which it overlaps with Cathay Pacific’s is shown in the map below. Normally, an airline’s flight numbering tells us something about their commercial organisation, with common flight numbers representing common regions or common commercial challenges.

Cathay Pacific’s flight numbering logic is a bit weird though. As shown in the map below, the 200s, 400s, 500s and 900s are geographically consistent.

But strangely, most 1xx flights go to Australia, but CX120 heads to Kaohsiung. 300 flights go to China, Germany and Switzerland. Dubai and Johannesburg share the 700s with south-east Asia. And while the 800s mostly go to America, CX854 heads off to Wuhan. I wonder why? Please let me know if you have any ideas…

Hong Kong Express flight numbers look quite standard.

So to what extent is Cathay a Chinese airline? Let’s look at the data:

Just over 20% of both flights and seats go to and from mainland China. That is quite a significant percentage. It is interesting that both the number of flight pairs and the number of seats are both similar percentages. This occurs because most of Cathay’s planes are wide-bodies.

I did not consider the proportion of available seat miles to and from China because that sort of analysis will lead to weird results in cases like this, like British Airways being a north American carrier…

As I went through Cathay’s network I noticed some interesting things:

1. Beijing and Tokyo use a 777-300ER with a first class cabin and first class fares filed ready for sale. The Beijing service connects nicely to and from Cathay’s mainline first class services to London, Paris and Los Angeles but not to New York, with a two to three hour connection on the way in to China and a slightly longer six to seven hour connection in Cathay’s plush Wing and Pier lounges on the way out. Haneda’s connection is shorter. I have written before about how China and the rest of Asia is a first class market (see article). Here is some proof.

2. Not all the scheduled flights are actually open for sale right now, including the first class service to Beijing. Presumably Cathay expects these markets to be viable long term but revenue management will open them up when required.

3. Looking this far ahead, most flights seem to be in one aircraft configuration. All the Chinese flights using A330-300 use the 33E configuration with 39 Cirrus II business class seats and 223 economy seats. But Cathay has the mid-sized Airbus in several configs, including a denser 28-biz version and a 39-biz/21-premium version. It is significant that Cathay is scheduling 39-biz seat aircraft with fully-flat beds to mainland China. There is clearly a lot of demand for exceptional interiors.

4. I thought it very interesting that there are more than 220 million people in the Chinese mainland cities served by Cathay Pacific. Now GDP per capita tends to matter more for air travel demand than population alone, hence tiny Qatar’s flag carrier Qatar Airways makes a mint with the Qsuite (see article). But still, that’s a significant proportion of the population of North America and Europe, to which Cathay Pacific has a relative handful of flights.

5. It is interesting that Hong Kong Express, the low-cost-carrier, only serves one mainland China destination. China is clearly a premium market for Cathay Pacific.

So is Cathay Pacific a Chinese airline? With more than 20% of flights to and from mainland China, plenty of real business class flat-bed seats and a big chunk of daily capacity in the market, they are certainly more Chinese than British Airways is British (see article)!

oliver AT ransonpricing DOT com

All maps generated by Great Circle Mapper.