QUESTION FOR THE WEEK: Seasonality is a big issue in the travel sector, but can you name the top ten countries with the largest seasonal shift in capacity between summer and winter flight schedules?

In our new weekly series to break up those Monday morning office blues, The Blue Swan Daily will be testing your knowledge and insight into the aviation and travel industry. This is all just for fun, but who knows? We may be able to find a prize somewhere around CAPA HQ. This week's question is detailed below. The answers will be revealed and winners (if there are any correct entries) announced next week alongside our next question.

Overcoming the issue of seasonality is one of the most significant issues impact airline and airport demand. You can't escape from the issue as passenger demand varies across all markets in some way even on some of the strongest city pairs.

Through experience airlines and airports have worked hard to find a seasonality balance to try and match demand with capacity in the most profitable way. Airlines will perhaps add leased capacity during traffic peaks or even lease out their own equipment during the quieter periods.

Similarly, airports across the globe have to ensure they have capacity to meet seasonal peaks, both in terms of infrastructure and staff. There is also no best formula as every airline and airport have a different passenger profile that will affect how hard it is impacted by seasonality - even business travel has its own peaks and troughs across the year.

Seasonality obviously varies between the northern and southern hemispheres. Looking at OAG schedule data for the northern winter 2018/2019 and summer 2019 schedules, shows the global level of seasonality up +49.0% with total system seats growing from just over 2.3 billion to almost 3.5 billion. This is an increase of 1.38 million seats per day between the two schedule periods, an average daily growth of +9.3%.

Our QUESTION OF THE WEEK is…

Seasonality is a big issue in the travel sector, but can you name the top ten countries with the largest seasonal shift in capacity between summer and winter flight schedules?

JOIN IN THE FUN: Send your answers to: The Blue Swan Daily Content Team

We will be revealing the answers at the same time next week, when we will be setting another question.

Last week we asked… Unlucky for some, the United Kingdom is the largest international market by scheduled seat capacity from 13 countries in May-2019. Can you name them?

The answer was… Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, Slovakia and Spain.

A number of your answers included the 16 countries where the UK is the second largest international market by departure seats during the month. Out of interest these comprise Barbados, Bermuda, Canada, Cape Verde, Croatia, Cyprus, Faroe Islands, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Qatar, Romania, Saint Lucia, Slovenia and South Africa.