The October report from Sydney Airport today was somewhat different from Cairns Airport:

Sydney Airport CEO Geoff Culbert said, “We had more than 3.9 million passengers travelling through the airport during October. This has been the busiest month for 2018, with growth of 3.2 per cent compared to October 2017.
“International passenger traffic in October increased 6.0% compared to the prior corresponding period. Domestic passenger traffic also performed well growing 1.6%. This strong October result was driven by both seat capacity growth and stable load factors.
“Sydney’s fastest growing foreign nationalities included Japanese (13.0%), American (12.3%) and Indian (10.1%) visitors. Australian outbound international passenger growth also performed well increasing 8.6% for the month, with many Australians choosing to travel overseas during the September/October school holiday period.”

Now these are very different airports with a different mix of passengers. However, if anything this may indicate the recent underperformance gap at Cairns has not closed or may even have widened further.

Sydney provides this information because it is a listed public company. Cairns Airport has provided timely information superior to any other airport apart from Sydney that I am aware of in Australia. However given the relative significance to Cairns and issues around a controversial privatisation maybe it should. Cairns Airport has provided no commentary on monthly performance for two months now which is the first time I can recall .

The ABS Overseas Arrivals & Departures data was out yesterday with a few interesting things to look at.

Update: Sydney also provides excellent timely monthly data on international visitor traffic.

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