1. A difficult start to 2022
At the very start of the year, I got off a junk in Hong Kong after a nice relaxing day on the water – to be greeted by the news that we were going to have to close down our entire long-haul operation for at least a week because of changes to flight crew quarantine requirements. It wasn’t the best start to 2022 and was very frustrating at a time of extremely high demand. But our teams were resilient and we focused on where we could continue to operate. So while our long-haul capacity remained constrained up until the end of May, our regional capacity increased and we were able to fill it very effectively.
When crew quarantine restrictions were eased, we were able to remount our long-haul capacity. This coincided with the traditionally quieter summer period, despite there being some hope that the lockdowns on the Chinese Mainland would diminish and consumer demand would remain relatively robust as the year went on. That didn’t quite materialise.