Domestic passenger numbers: no growth since 2019

[Melburnian1]

The Federal Government's BITRE issued its August 2026 domestic airline passenger numbers statistics today.

No growth since pre-COVID 2019.

Do we ascribe this to a slowly rising takeup of Zoom and other online meetings, a poorly performing economy with (as of an hour ago) five RBA cash rate rises, private sector investment being 'crowded out' by record public sector spending or other factors?

Australia's population continues to rise each year but air travel numbers, while variable from month to month, mostly have (at least slightly) decreased per capita.

Here's a summary from BITRE:

https://www.bitre.gov.au/resource/aviation/domestic-aviation-activity

5.41 million passengers were carried on Australian domestic commercial aviation (including charter operations) in August 2026 compared with 5.42 million in August 2025 (down 0.1%). This is a decrease of 0.3% on pre-COVID August 2019 passenger numbers (5.43 million).

5.02 million passengers were carried on RPT flights in August 2026 (excluding charter operations), a decrease of 0.8% compared with August 2025.

In August 2026 there were 48.9 thousand RPT aircraft trips, a decrease of 3.6% on August 2025.

For the year ending August 2026 there were 60.69 million RPT passengers, an increase of 1.5% on the year ending August 2025.

RPT revenue passenger km (RPKs) performed were 6.11 billion for the month, compared with 6.13 billion in August 2025 (down 0.3%).

Capacity, measured by available seat km (ASKs) decreased to 7.23 billion in August 2026 compared with 7.45 billion in August 2025 (down 2.9%).

The industry-wide load factor (RPKs/ASKs) increased from 82.2% in August 2025 to 84.5% in August 2026.

 

[AuSammy]

One data point only:

In a part of the late nineties I was flying minimum 5 often 7+ sectors per week for business.

After I left and conference calls became more common and remote access programs and terminal equipment technology improved, my successors travel was slashed markedly.

Following covid and the upswell of zoom et al the current occupant has no travel budget at all except a small allocation of taxis vouchers (for when on the rare occasion he is not working from home). AFAIAA He still has staff in 3-4 domestic cities and one overseas.

 

[eastwest101]

The Federal Government's BITRE issued its August 2026 domestic airline passenger numbers statistics today.

No growth since pre-COVID 2019.

Do we ascribe this to a slowly rising takeup of Zoom and other online meetings, a poorly performing economy with (as of an hour ago) five RBA cash rate rises, private sector investment being 'crowded out' by record public sector spending or other factors?

Australia's population continues to rise each year but air travel numbers, while variable from month to month, mostly have (at least slightly) decreased per capita.

Here's a summary from BITRE:

https://www.bitre.gov.au/resource/aviation/domestic-aviation-activity

5.41 million passengers were carried on Australian domestic commercial aviation (including charter operations) in August 2026 compared with 5.42 million in August 2025 (down 0.1%). This is a decrease of 0.3% on pre-COVID August 2019 passenger numbers (5.43 million).

5.02 million passengers were carried on RPT flights in August 2026 (excluding charter operations), a decrease of 0.8% compared with August 2025.

In August 2026 there were 48.9 thousand RPT aircraft trips, a decrease of 3.6% on August 2025.

For the year ending August 2026 there were 60.69 million RPT passengers, an increase of 1.5% on the year ending August 2025.

RPT revenue passenger km (RPKs) performed were 6.11 billion for the month, compared with 6.13 billion in August 2025 (down 0.3%).

Capacity, measured by available seat km (ASKs) decreased to 7.23 billion in August 2026 compared with 7.45 billion in August 2025 (down 2.9%).

The industry-wide load factor (RPKs/ASKs) increased from 82.2% in August 2025 to 84.5% in August 2026.

I think it's a variety of factors as the post alludes to. No doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic definitely stopped interstate and international travel, with the response by airlines being the destruction of capacity and downsizing of airline workforces. When travel resumed, they had neither the hard capacity or soft capacity to recover, as they had lost a lot of experience and expertise; new aircraft deliveries ran behind schedule with production delays and aircraft cost blowouts. and technical problems and groundings of various families of aircraft and/or shortages of engines.

Certainly no doubt that Zoom/Teams and online work patterns and workforce outsourcing reduced travel expenditure as well making corporate travel harder to justify. Possibly a bit of an ageing population story as well as the nation has gotten older and less propensity to travel for leisure as people diverted their travel spend from flying and hotels into expensive 4WDs and caravans, locking them into a cycle of more driving holidays to justify the cost of the aforementioned 4WDs and caravans.

Smaller aircraft, higher frequency and higher load factors must have improved yields, and you could hardly say the landscape within Australia for aviation has been competitive, so there might be a perception of flying as becoming more of an expensive luxury than it was pre-Covid. The high barriers of entry are a bit of a deterrent for new entrants. The cost of fuel post-invasion of Ukraine and general inflation of all goods, wages and services post Covid obviously have become baked in to the current airlines' cost structures; if they aren't baked in, then the airline often goes broke.

 

[esseeeayeenn]

Do we ascribe this to a slowly rising takeup of Zoom and other online meetings,

The take-up of online meetings has been rising anything but slowly.

While Zoom may have been the first popular online meeting tool, Teams has now become ubiquitous, because it is installed with Microsoft Office.
During COVID these online meetings didn't only replace work travel: they replaced daily in person interactions with people who usually worked together in the same office. Almost the entire white collar workforce was working from home, and we relied on online meetings.

Once online meeting applications had the opportunity to demonstrate that they could replace not only meetings but virtually all in person interactions, work travel for such purposes became difficult if not impossible to justify. The impact went far beyond travel: at the same time, physical phones all but disappeared from office desks. They were also replaced by Teams, and VOIP apps, which only required a headset.

Even appearances before courts and tribunals moved online during COVID, and in some circumstances people still appear remotely before, for example, Senate estimates committees.

This change is reflected in my flight history.
I took 85 flights in 2014 and 61 in 2015. This had dropped to 37 in 2019.
This fell to 15 in 2020 - but only 2 post the onset of COVID in February. 5 in each of 2021 & 2022.
Since then it has stabilised at about 20 each year: almost all of which are personal.

I don't hold out any hope of returning to the golden days of work funded travel.

 

[AuSammy]

I note also in the hey day of business travel participants being flown into a central site to attend corporate training or gee-up sessions was commonplace. Nowadays they log into video training, conducted at their own pace at home. Corporate town halls are now zoom, even the taxis miss out.

 

[Saab34]

Many corporates are trying to find savings in the travel part also, they haven’t put out new rules in my outfit or anything, but it’s more just a common sense, is this travel needed sort of thing. Our office would probably get a visit monthly, now it’s more yearly. I think some people have finally woken up that there is MANY people in corporate land simply blowing cash flying around trying to showcase their egos.

 

[Wing Nut]

Not read the report but wonder if the decline in corporate travel was offset by an increase in leisure travel essentially keeping overall passenger numbers constant.

 

[dajop]

Also don’t forget in 2019 we were just coming off the huge capacity war between VA and QF with lots of discounting. Tiger were also still in the market. VA, QF and JQ all seem to exhibit a greater degree of capacity discipline now than they did in the ‘10s which means it’s a combination of reduced demand due to more remote business dealings and suppressed demand due to less capacity and higher fares.

A flat domestic market represents a drop in relative traffic given the 7.5% population increase over the same period.

Also it would be interesting to see the Bali figures . I have hunch a bit of domestic leisure travel as shifted to there.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

The Federal Government's BITRE issued its August 2026 domestic airline passenger numbers statistics today.

No growth since pre-COVID 2019.

Do we ascribe this to a slowly rising takeup of Zoom and other online meetings, a poorly performing economy with (as of an hour ago) five RBA cash rate rises, private sector investment being 'crowded out' by record public sector spending or other factors?

Australia's population continues to rise each year but air travel numbers, while variable from month to month, mostly have (at least slightly) decreased per capita.

Here's a summary from BITRE:

https://www.bitre.gov.au/resource/aviation/domestic-aviation-activity

5.41 million passengers were carried on Australian domestic commercial aviation (including charter operations) in August 2026 compared with 5.42 million in August 2025 (down 0.1%). This is a decrease of 0.3% on pre-COVID August 2019 passenger numbers (5.43 million).

5.02 million passengers were carried on RPT flights in August 2026 (excluding charter operations), a decrease of 0.8% compared with August 2025.

In August 2026 there were 48.9 thousand RPT aircraft trips, a decrease of 3.6% on August 2025.

For the year ending August 2026 there were 60.69 million RPT passengers, an increase of 1.5% on the year ending August 2025.

RPT revenue passenger km (RPKs) performed were 6.11 billion for the month, compared with 6.13 billion in August 2025 (down 0.3%).

Capacity, measured by available seat km (ASKs) decreased to 7.23 billion in August 2026 compared with 7.45 billion in August 2025 (down 2.9%).

The industry-wide load factor (RPKs/ASKs) increased from 82.2% in August 2025 to 84.5% in August 2026.

Perhaps more important is the revenue and profit, rather than actual numbers.

 

[moa999]

we were just coming off the huge capacity wa

And much higher base fuel prices.
Would be interesting to see the average fare 2019- 2026