The airline carried 3.5 million passengers in 2021, with an average seat load factor of 39.6%. Passenger loads doubled in the second half of the year, reaching 70.1% in December as travel demand peaked during the winter holiday period. The airline recorded a particularly strong surge in passenger volumes in Q4 following the September relaxation of mandatory quarantine periods in Abu Dhabi.
Network capacity came in at 37.21 billion ASKs for the year, with the airline connecting Abu Dhabi to 71 passenger and cargo destinations across 47 countries. The airline launched or restarted operations to 13 destinations in 2021, most notably introducing scheduled services to Tel Aviv following the normalisation of relations between the UAE and Israel.
Etihad Airways posted passenger revenues of US$ 1.07 billion in 2021, down by 14% year-on-year. While ongoing travel restrictions and new variants of the virus dampened demand, the airline saw passenger revenues bounce back in the last quarter of the year, recovering to 50% of 2019 levels in December.
Cargo operations meanwhile continued to outperform expectations, with a 27% year-on-year increase in freight carried in 2021 coupled with a rise in cargo revenues of 49% to $1.73 billion, the highest figure in the history of the airline.
Tony Douglas, Group Chief Executive Officer, commented: “In another year of global uncertainty, Etihad Airways has continued to move forward, strengthen its business, and build on its world-class travel proposition. Despite the slowdown caused by Omicron, we are confident that the spring and summer season will continue to see a resurgence in travel
“As operations progressively ramped up throughout 2021, Etihad maintained an absolute focus on cost control, decreasing operating costs by a further $110 million, despite a $197 million increase in fuel costs driven by rallying oil prices.
Overall, Etihad recorded a core operating loss of $476 million for fiscal year 2021, representing a 72% improvement compared to 2020 and a 41% improvement against pre-pandemic results in 2019.
Adam Boukadida, Chief Financial Officer, said: “Despite Covid-19 suppressing global travel demand for a second year running, we have continued to transform Etihad Airways into a more efficient business, delivering additional line-by-line savings and further optimising our cost base.
“Pushing the frontiers of sustainable financing, we issued the first-ever sustainability-linked ESG loan in aviation, while at the same time reducing our outstanding debt by more than 20%. All these factors combined resulted in a strong year-end liquidity position, aligned to our pre-pandemic levels, and in a steadfast ‘A with a stable outlook’ credit rating reaffirmed by Fitch.”
