< Reveal sidebar

Airline Metrics: Revenue Passenger Kilometers

Photo provided by United

Ashwin Jadhav, a member of our AirlineGeeks team, has begun highlighting some of the important metrics that airlines monitor on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis to improve performance. From a passenger’s perspective, this series will provide an excellent insight on how these metrics affect the way you travel.

Previous Metric in the Series: Available Seat Kilometers

Definition

Revenue Passenger Kilometers (RPK) or Revenue Passenger Miles (RPM)* is an airline industry metric that shows the number of kilometers traveled by paying passengers. It is calculated as the number of revenue passengers multiplied by the total distance traveled. Since it measures the actual demand for air transport, it is often referred to as airline “traffic.”

They are often compared to the available seat kilometers (ASK), which show the total number of passenger kilometers that could be generated in order to determine the amount of revenue that comes in compared to the maximum amount.

*While miles are the preferred unit of measuring distance in the U.S., the rest of the world uses kilometers as units for measuring distance. In the aviation industry, kilometers are used more often than miles in formulation and analysis of metrics and key performance indicators.

How is it calculated?

RPKs measure an airline’s demand for their service and are calculated by multiplying the number of paying passengers by the distance traveled. It is:

Number of revenue passengers × total distance travelled

This number should be calculated per airplane, but is usually quoted per airline.

An increase in RPK is positive for an airline. It means that more passengers are using their service.

Why is it important?

RPKs are the backbone of most transportation metrics. Airlines have to try to match their supply (ASKs) with the market demand (RPKs). While shortage of seats will often result in higher airfare, excess capacity can lead to reduced margins due to higher fixed costs. So an increase in capacity is positive only if it is supported by an adequate rise in demand for air travel.

RPKs give airline senior management a clear indication of the demand in a given market. To support RPK improvement, airlines should add more seats or increase capacity. Another way to do this without adding capacity is to improve efficiency by utilizing existing capacity.

RPKs are further used to calculate Load Factor and Yield.

Simple Example

Blank Airlines operates one Boeing 737-800 aircraft with a capacity of 200 passengers between New York (JFK) and Chicago (ORD). However, the revenue passengers for the route are 190 passengers per leg. The distance between the two airports is 1,190 KM, which means that the RPK per leg flown is 190 (the passenger demand) multiplied 1,190 (the distance traveled by the passengers).

Hence, Blank Airlines has 226,100 Revenue Passenger Kilometers per flight leg.

Based on the frequency of this route per day and per year, the daily and annual RPKs can be calculated accordingly.

Real-World Quiz

Blank Airlines is a domestic U.S. carrier that operates a fleet of 10 aircraft between major cities in the country. The aircraft, capacity, city-pairs and distances are given below. Assuming that the aircraft operates for all 365 days in a year and assuming that all passengers are revenue passengers, what will the RPKs be per year for Blank Airlines?

Aircraft Number of Passengers City-Pair Frequency            (+ Return Legs) Distance (KM)
Boeing 737-800 190 JFK-ORD Daily (4x) + (4x) 1,188
Boeing 737-800 200 JFK-MIA Daily (4x) + (4x) 1,757
Boeing 737-800 210 JFK-ATL Daily (4x) + (4x) 1,223
CRJ700 60 JFK-IAD Daily (6x) + (6x) 365
CRJ700 62 JFK-PHL Daily (6x) + (6x) 151
CRJ700 63 JFK-YUL Daily (6x) + (6x) 535
CRJ700 68 JFK-CLT Daily (6x) + (6x) 871
CRJ700 66 JFK-BOS Daily (6x) + (6x) 300
A330-300 380 JFK-LAX Daily (2x) + (2x) 3,975
A330-300 410 JFK-SFO Daily (2x) + (2x) 4,154
AirlineGeeks.com Staff

Author

  • AirlineGeeks.com Staff

    AirlineGeeks.com was founded in February 2013 as a one-person blog in Washington D.C. Since then, we’ve grown to have 25+ active team members scattered across the globe. We are all here for the same reason: we love deep-diving into the fascinating realm of the airline industry.

Subscribe to AirlineGeeks' Daily Check-In

Receive a daily dose of the airline industry's top stories along with market insights right in your inbox.

Related Stories

A Look at the Qatar Airways Stopover Program

Given that the majority of passengers traveling on the big Middle Eastern airlines are connecting, these airlines offer stopover packages…

The Large Air Carrier That Few Know Exists

The concept of an “airline” is a familiar one: a single company operates specific aircraft to specific places, either regularly…

New Turkish Airlines Subsidiary Receives Air Operator Certificate

AJet, a proposed low-cost airline owned entirely by Turkish Airlines, has received its Air Operator’s Certificate. This allows the carrier…