Air Berlin, 1,5% increase in capacity utilization in August 2015

Airberlin is continuing on its path towards restructuring and was able to significantly improve its overall capacity utilization in August, both year on year, and in comparison with the previous month.

The capacity utilization rate, taking into account the capacity adaptation carried out, increased by 1.5 percent, thus reaching a record level of 90.9 percent.

The capacity utilization for the first eight months of 2015 also increased in yearly comparison, reaching 84.5 percent, an increase of 0.8 percentage points over the previous year.

As Stefan Pichler, CEO of the airberlin group, stated: "This positive development demonstrates that we are on track with the first initiated measures we are taking to reposition airberlin. It is now important that we achieve a stable capacity utilization in the coming months as well. The higher capacity utilization contributes to a positive business development. We introduced significant, tough measures across our business in the first half of 2015 in order to optimize our operations and we are continuing to explore ways to reduce our operating costs still further. The implementation of our world-class revenue management system will be the driving force for further improvements in the quality of our revenue.

In total, 3,326,489 passengers traveled on airberlin in the month of August. Due to the capacity reduction by 6.9 percent in August, Germany's second-largest airline company recorded 4.2 percent fewer passengers than in the corresponding month of the previous year. The accumulated number of passengers for the January to August 2015 period declined by 4.0 percent to 20,609,465 passengers in yearly comparison, whereas capacity was reduced by 6.5 percent during that period.

In line with airberlin's continuous global network and fleet optimization programme, the revenue passenger kilometers (RPK) decreased by 4.4 percent to 5.170 billion kilometers and the available seat kilometers (ASK) decreased by 6.1 percent to 5.691 billion kilometers.