Chinese airlines have recorded about 491,000 cancellations of tickets to Japan since Saturday – roughly 32 per cent of their total bookings to the typically popular destination – after Beijing advised citizens to avoid travelling there amid a diplomatic spat, according to a veteran aviation analyst.
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The percentage of flights affected skyrocketed to 82.14 per cent on Sunday and 75.6 per cent on Monday, according to independent analyst Li Hanming, citing his research data covering all mainland China-based airlines.
“The flight-ticket cancellations [on Sunday] were 27 times that of new bookings, which shows safety concerns are the dominating factor for travel,” he said, adding that he had not seen cancellations on such a scale since early in 2020, as Covid-19 infections surged at the tail end of the Lunar New Year travel period.
The spread of the coronavirus resulted in flight capacity into and out of China falling “sharply” around the holiday that year, according to an analysis posted on the World Economic Forum website. A 71 per cent capacity drop on February 17, 2020, over the same date in 2019 was China’s sharpest ever, it said.
On Friday, after Beijing’s warning to Chinese travellers, airlines offered full refunds for flights to Japan.
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China-Japan tensions had escalated over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s suggestion on November 7 that Tokyo could deploy its military forces in the event of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait.
PLA Daily, the People’s Liberation Army’s official mouthpiece, warned on Sunday that Japan risked turning the entire country into a battlefield if it intervened militarily in the Taiwan Strait.