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Air New Zealand's new route to Britain via Kong Kong and cutting back of transtasman services helped pack its planes with more passengers last month.
The airline said yesterday that its passenger load factor - the proportion of seats filled - improved by 5.9 percentage points to 80.2 per cent in April, compared with a year earlier.
Fuelling this overall result was an 11.4 percentage point boost in the long haul route to the UK via Asia and Japan sector to 82.2 per cent. Passenger numbers on that route are up 55 per cent on a year ago.
"Hong Kong has significantly boosted traffic performance to/from Asia and also beyond traffic to/from Europe," the airline said.
Forsyth Barr aviation analyst Rob Mercer said it was "quite unusual to get increase in capacity on those sorts of markets and get immediately such high load factors", he said.
The merging of the Freedom Air operations with Air New Zealand's helped lift the Tasman/Pacific load factor 8 percentage points to 82.4 percent, he said.
"The company had little choice but to reduce capacity on loss-making Tasman routes after its preferred code share option did not gain regulatory approval," the company said.
Air New Zealand's shares finished the day flat at $2.80.
