Airline statistics specialist OAG released its 2019 rankings of the most profitable airline routes last week. These figures are interesting at first glance, but they become even more so if we put them in perspective with trends and other preconceived ideas of the moment.

How is the success of an airline route measured?

Before going any further, we should ask ourselves what makes an airline route a success. Success is measured either on the customer’s side or on the airline’s side.

First of all, on the airline’s side. This is naturally measured financially by various indicators such as overall revenue, revenue per flight hour and revenue per seat.

On the passenger side, it is the number of passengers carried.

One measures financial success (profitability), the other commercial success (attractiveness). Don’t the two go together? Not necessarily so.

You have very business routes that will generate a lot of money with “few” passengers and “leisure” routes that will attract a lot of people but make little money. And the two do not always coincide.

In the middle you have the mixed destinations that are both successful in business, premium tourism and mass tourism.

The most profitable routes are…

And so here are the most profitable routes between April 2018 and March 2019 by route and airline according to OAG.

Two things are obvious.

First of all, the predominance of business routes: we don’t see many “leisure” lines in this table even if they can be hidden in the thickness of the line: a London-Singapore flight can take connecting passengers to Bali… Except that logic would dictate that they should not fly on British Airways, which does not have a partner airline in Singapore, but rather go through Hong Kong and end up on Cathay Pacific.

The power of London and the United Kingdom in Europe. London is involved in 5 of the top 10 revenue-generating routes. We can think what we want about the Brexit and its conditions of implementation, but this should not make us lose sight of where the center of gravity of business and high-contribution travel in Europe is located. The “high contribution” customer, profitable and adored by the airlines, does not go through Paris or Frankfurt!

But this method of calculation has some limitations that cannot be ignored.

First, this ranking is only from a revenue perspective: there may be routes that are busier but generate less revenue because they are less frequented by high-contribution passengers. This ranking also favors long-haul flights where tickets are logically more expensive.

Then revenue does not mean profitability, on business oriented routes yes, but on busy leisure routes this is not always the case. Revenue per seat would have been a relevant indicator.

Finally it is a classification by airline and not by route. We privilege here the airlines that dominate a route without showing the routes where the traffic is better distributed.

So this is just one view of the subject. By the way, this is a new reading that OAG is proposing of a report already released in March, which put more emphasis on traffic per route.

What are the most popular routes?

Here we can see different things. The New York-London route, for example, only appears in 13th position and we can see the emergence of medium-haul routes, whether for business or leisure. Moreover, there are few long-haul routes in this ranking, dominated by what I would call “commuter” routes.

But at first sight it is the “business” routes that continue to dominate (Kuala Lumpur-Singapore, Hong Kong-Taipei, Jakarta-Singapore, Hong Kong-Shangai come first).

We also see a predominance of Asian routes which is easily explained. The presence of numerous islands makes land transportation often inappropriate. And the absence of a high-speed rail network, with a few notable exceptions, has created a real airplane culture on medium-haul routes with, contrary to what we generally see in Europe, twin-aisle wide-body aircraft such as A330s or B777s assigned to routes of 3 hours or less!

Here again it is London that saves the honor for Europe with 2 presences in the top 20 (including one for the Dublin-London).

Logically, there is only one European air carrier in the Top 5 of these routes…and it’s even surprising considering their location…

This is KLM, which has a 4% share of the Jakarta-Kuala Lumpur route, as its Amsterdam-Jakarta flight has a stopover in Malaysia and it operates the segment between Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta as “5th freedom”.

The same goes for the surprising Ethiopian Airlines, which takes 2% of the Kuala Lumpur-Singapore route.

What are the busiest domestic routes?

Logically, there is a total absence of domestic routes in European countries due to the size of the countries and a developed high-speed rail infrastructure. On the other hand, we will find many Asian countries and once again countries where the infrastructure does not favor land transportation or where the distances are too big.

And the busiest roads in Europe are…

Let’s end with a look at Europe with some rather surprising figures.

As far as international routes from Europe are concerned, I won’t go back to the London-New York route which is at the top of the ranking and which we have already talked about.

Nevertheless, London is again in the top 10 5 times (4 times for Heathrow and once for Gatwick). This is logically explained by the island nature of the United Kingdom but not only: London remains by far the capital of business travel in Europe, in addition to being on an island. It should be noted that once again, despite being the largest European airport, Roissy does not appear in the ranking and, strangely, neither does Frankfurt, while London-Munich comes in 9th position.

Another remark: Greta Thunberg still has a lot of work to do at home in spite of all the (over-amplified) noise around the “flygskam”. Northern European countries are big consumers of medium-haul flights and this can be easily explained by the lack of land continuity between the Scandinavian capitals. A battle lost in advance at a time when, paradoxically, SAS is posting its best month of July, boosted by its medium-haul business, and is multiplying its announcements of new route openings.

As far as domestic flights are concerned, we notice that Turkey defends itself very well, due to the size of the country and sometimes the state of the infrastructures! But this ranking holds a few other surprises.

Barcelona-Madrid is half of it because it is a very well served route by high speed train. As for Paris-Toulouse, it clearly shows that the TGV loses its attractiveness for a more than 3-hours journey.

In any case, the remarkable absence of Paris and Frankfurt in these rankings may call into question the center of gravity of the European economy a few weeks before a Brexit, which we will see whether or not it changes the game.