March 2025 Monthly traffic update

GENERAL

Tue, Apr 15 2025 08:30 am

March 2025 Monthly traffic update

Key points:

• In March 2025, there was a total of 860k international passenger movements in the month, a 4% decrease compared to the same month in 2024. International passenger movements, excluding transits, for the month of March 2025 decreased by 2%. International seat capacity decreased by 4% for the month of March with 49k fewer seats resulting in average load factors of 81.3%, a 0.6 percentage point improvement on the year prior;

• Seat capacity on USA routes declined by 18% or 30k seats. Just under half of the decline was attributable to Air New Zealand's suspension of Chicago services and United Airlines' exit from the Los Angeles route. The remainder of the seat capacity decline was due to Air New Zealand reducing the number of flights to Houston and San Francisco in the month. Despite the reduction in seat capacity on the USA routes, load factors increased by 5.9 percentage points;

• Trans-Tasman capacity reduced by 6% or 26k fewer seats with two-thirds of the reduction attributable to fifth-freedom airlines reducing capacity on the routes. Load factors on the routes declined by 1.1 percentage points, in part, due to the earlier timing of Easter last year compared to this year (Easter Friday was 29 March last year compared to 18 April this year) and the later timing of April school holidays for three Australian states (QLD, VIC, WA) this year compared to last;

• Reviewing the five largest nationalities through the international terminal during March 2025 shows that New Zealand nationals experienced a modest increase of 0.5%, with Australian nationals decreasing 6%, USA nationals decreasing 5% and UK nationals also decreasing 7%. Chinese nationals increased 4%;

• Domestic passenger movements decreased 3% in the month of March 2025 when compared to the same month in the prior year, with seat capacity similar levels to last year, resulting in domestic load factors declining by 3 percentage points to 84.7%; and

• Queenstown Airport international passenger numbers in March 2025 were flat on the year prior and domestic passengers decreased by -3% on the same month last year.