More On Premium Traffic's Steep Decline

(MoneyWatch)  The IATA monthly premium traffic monitor (PDF) (aka the "report of doom" these days) is out for January and once again the news is not good. While the decline in economy traffic moderated slightly in January, the decline in premium traffic accelerated to negative 16.7 percent. Barbara already wrote about this to some extent today, but I decided to look further at the numbers.

The news is bleak all around, but Asian traffic is hurting the most of all. Europe to the Far East saw traffic down 21.2 percent year over year. Travel within the Far East dropped 23.4 percent and travel over the North Pacific was down 24.7 percent. With these kinds of numbers, the mere 14.5 percent decline in North Atlantic travel doesn't look too bad.

Were there any bright spots? A couple, but none of them were significant. The extremely tiny Africa to Southwest Pacific market went up 7.8 percent. Premium travel within Africa was up 18.9 percent as well, but that was it. Those two count for a whopping 0.8% of total premium traffic around the globe, so it's not much of a bright spot.

The losses were in the single digits in the Middle East and in some other areas, like North to Central America, but overall, the news is bad. So if you thought that we had reached a bottom, there's nothing in this report showing that to be the case just yet.