July 2017 T-100 - Middle East
July is the biggest month for BOS in terms of passengers across the board and it's no different with the middle east carriers for this year. A record number passed through Logan because of the 2nd daily EK to DXB and the recently launched QR Service. That said TK is showing signs of struggle due to the political and life instabilities in Turkey at the present time with little sign of that changing any time soon.
EK continues to be a powerhouse, pulling in approx 600 pax each way per day to DXB in July, which has spawned some debate about how EK plan to manage potentially bring the whalejet to BOS in the not too distant future. the overall load factors between 15 and 16 have dropped, but that's as a result of a doubling of capacity, running at 70% YTD against 85% (with 1 flight) last year. Rolling 12 months is showing over 300,000 pax now using this service, quite extraordinary given 3 years ago, this route did not even exist.
QR is the surprise package, many expected them to struggle up against EK and a concern about market availability, but after a soft April, May/June and July have pulled some serious numbers already with 51K pax so far and a 93% load factor in July alone. While it will be interesting to see how they work with the low months in the winter, this is clearly an excellent start to their operation.
LY continue to plod along and are now into their 2nd year of operation rolling 12 months has them at 75% loads and for July they actually carried slightly more passengers than 2015 ticking up their loads by nearly 3%.
The challenge with this sector is TK, due to lot of factors outside of their control (geo-political climate) they are down 7% on loads on a rolling 12 month basis, carrying roughly 8K less passengers during that period, so they must be hurting, although maybe ok if they are still covered by incentives. July, even though six less flights (3 days) passengers dropped by 11% on a 4% drop in effective capacity and a 6.3% drop in loads as a result. That spells concern if that happens in the busiest month of the year.
All in all, YTD, nearly 380K passengers on Middle East Service recorded and from the Massport stats, that will almost certainly equate to 600K passengers for the full year 2016, no doubt.