During July, more than 2.8 million passengers traveled with SAS, which is a record number for July and a slight increase compared to the same month last year. At the same time, SAS had a significant improvement in operational performance as well as a favorable development of yield.

SAS traffic had a positive development during July, during which scheduled capacity increased with over 2% and number of passengers increased by 0.2%. Regularity increased with 1.8 percentage points to 99.6% and punctuality increased by 4.4 percentage points to 72.4%. During the summer season, the demand for leisure travel is high and we shift our capacity toward leisure-oriented routes. Compared to last year demand has been high on domestic and European routes, while slightly lower on intercontinental traffic. Currency adjusted yield continues to develop favorably, increasing 1.5%.

- We are pleased that the number of passengers that chose to travel with SAS are at record level for the month of July. It shows that our strategy of shifting capacity toward leisure-oriented routes during the peak season is taking us in the right direction, and that we have a competitive customer offering. Since last year we have made several improvements to ensure a stable operational performance. Our efforts have paid off, resulting in significantly improved punctuality and regularity compared to last year. Also, the renewal of our fleet towards more fuel-efficient aircraft results in lower CO2 emissions, in July a new A330E was delivered and we were able to phase-out an older and less efficient A340 aircraft in our long-range fleet, says Rickard Gustafson, CEO of SAS.

Contributed by SAS