(Yicai) May 17 -- Ticket prices in China’s civil aviation industry plunged in the off-peak season after the five-day Labor Day holiday ended May 5.

The average ticket price for economy class tickets for domestic flights fell nearly 40 percent to CNY627 (USD87) between May 9 and yesterday, according to data from travel agency Trip.Com. The airfares for popular routes, such as Beijing-Sanya, Shenzhen-Chengdu, Xi’an-Hangzhou, Hangzhou-Guangzhou, and Haikou-Shanghai, sank over 50 percent.

Yicai also found that Trip.Com offered huge discounts on tickets for the next one to two weeks. For example, tickets for the Hangzhou-Haikou, Chengdu-Kunming, and Xi’an-Qingdao routes for that period cost only CNY100 to CNY300, down 80 percent to 90 percent from their usual prices.

International flights are also much cheaper now. The average ticket price for economy class tickets for international flights dropped 23 percent to CNY2,974 (USD412) in the week ended yesterday from the same period last year, Trip.Com data also showed.

On travel booking platform Qunar.Com, the airfare for a direct round-trip between Shanghai and Seoul is only CNY788, and that between Beijing and Osaka is CNY1,748, both down about 50 percent from during the Labor Day holiday.

The main reason for the decrease in airfares is the oversupply in air transportation capacity because despite huge operation losses during the pandemic, Chinese airlines increased their fleet by several hundreds of planes, Yicai noticed.

As international flights have not yet recovered to the pre-pandemic level, domestic flights will surely experience overcapacity, especially during off-peak seasons.

The airfare decline is also related to the adjusted ticket pricing strategy of Chinese airlines this year, sources at marketing departments of several carriers told Yicai.

Chinese airlines have a tacit understanding of setting airfares not lower than those in 2019 to ensure revenues during and shortly after the pandemic, the sources explained. However, it is difficult for them to maintain the tacit pricing strategy, as the passenger throughput grew significantly this year. Therefore, some carriers began to offer lower prices to tackle the competition.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione