Azul already ranked third in Brazil with almost 5% of domestic market

It just keeps getting bigger. In just six months, Azul has emerged as Brazil’s third largest domestic airline when measured by RPKs, accounting for 4.31% of domestic RPKs in June, while reporting impressive load factors of between 75% and 80% for May and June.

David Neeleman’s latest airline adventure, Azul, only launched in Brazil last December, but in just six months it has already emerged as Brazil’s third biggest domestic airline when measured by RPKs (revenue passenger kilometres). In June the airline accounted for 4.31% of domestic RPKs, overtaking WebJet which had 4.23%. In May and June Azul also reported impressive load factors of between 75% and 80%. In the last two months GOL has once again narrowed the gap on TAM with the two airlines now sharing around 87% of the market.

Source: ANAC

Domestic demand down less than 1% so far this year

Brazil’s air traffic market has been more resilient to the global economic downturn than most with domestic passenger numbers down less than 1% in the first five months of 2009, although in May demand was down 4.6%.

Source: ANAC

International passenger traffic has fallen 5.3% in the first five months of 2009 and is at similar levels to those seen in 2005. In May international passengers were down 7.1% on the previous year.

Source: Infraero

TAM’s share of international traffic among Brazilian carriers has consistently been above 85% in recent months, with Gol/Varig’s share around 13%. Since the start of the winter season there have been new international services to Sao Paulo from Delta (from Los Angeles), El Al (from Tel Aviv), Mexicana (from Mexico City), TAM (to Orlando) and Turkish Airlines (from Istanbul via Dakar).