OAG, the world’s premier airline flight tracking service, has announced the world’s busiest air routes, international and domestic, for 2023 and both are in Asia.
Kuala Lumpur to Singapore Changi takes out the international top spot with 4.90 million seats while Jeju to Seoul is the busiest domestic route with 13.7 million seats.
On the international rankings, Cairo to Jeddah is in second place with 4.8 million seats, there is just a two percent capacity difference between first and second place.
Hong Kong to Taipei is the third busiest international route in 2023 with 4.6 million seats. This was the busiest route in 2019 and capacity has dropped by 43 percent since then.
Seoul Incheon to Osaka Kansai is the fourth busiest international route in 2023 with 4.2 million seats.
Most routes in the international top 10 for 2023 have capacity ranging between nine percent and 43% below their 2019 levels, but one route has capacity above 2019, which is London Heathrow (LHR) to New York (JFK), one percent ahead with 3.5 million seats.
According to OAG, the busiest domestic airline route of 2023 is Jeju to Seoul with 13.7 million seats; this was also the busiest domestic route in both 2019 and 2022. There is a 15 percent gap in capacity between first and second place on this list.
In second place in OAG’s Top 10 is Hokkaido’s Chitose Airport to Tokyo Haneda with 11.9 million seats.
Fukuoka to Tokyo Haneda is the third busiest route with 11.3 million seats – there is only a six percent gap in capacity between second and third place.
Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City is the fourth busiest domestic airline route in 2023 with 10.9 million seats and Melbourne to Sydney is the fifth with 9.3 million seats.
Jakarta to Denpasar is in tenth place and is the only route in the top 10, which did not appear in the top 10 in 2019.
Equally, AOG in its 2023 airline industry report card for the airline industry, announced Friday, August 11, as the busiest day in the outgoing year when airlines operated 18,586,233 seats. For context, the average daily capacity over the year was 16,582,222, making this peak summer day 12 percent busier than the average travel day.
It, however, identified the third Saturday of the last year as the quietest day to travel by air based on 2023 data. 13,967,001 seats operated on January 21, making the day 16 percent less busy than the average for airline operators.
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