Listening out for the Song of Cathay

by Martin Moodie |
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Martin Moodie

Martin Moodie is the Founder & Chairman of The Moodie Report.

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It’s early Saturday morning and for once I’m enjoying a protracted stint back home in Hong Kong, my hitherto frenetic travel schedule on hold until the madness of the peak September-November period begins.

Discovery Bay, my home for the past three-and-a-half years, is cast in a murkier guise than usual, a combination of early-morning rain, mist and heavy cloud cover presenting a sharp though welcome contrast from the blazing summer heat and brilliant blue skies of recent days.

Because of the prevailing conditions, I can hear but not see the planes soaring above the distant hills, a sight that, on clear days, serves as a constant and oddly comforting reminder of the world of travel that I have inhabited for the past 37 years.

They are my equivalent of the green light across the bay that for Jay Gatsby, in my all-time favourite novel The Great Gatsby, not only symbolised his love for Daisy but also the illusory nature of the American Dream.

The only daisies in my life reside in my neighbour’s garden below. But illusory? Oh yes. Having lived here through the pandemic I take nothing for granted. When I moved to Discovery Bay in early 2021, Hong Kong was shrouded not in cloud cover but by the devastating impact of COVID and the sight of an aircraft flying over those same hills was almost a talking point in itself.

This week, Cathay Pacific announced it had carried 2,008,225 passengers in July, up +15.1% year-on-year, while the total for the first seven months (12.7 million) was ahead a whopping +32.5% on the 2023 equivalent, including a +51.8% spur in Mainland China traffic.

They are encouraging numbers but have to be seen in the context of pre-pandemic levels. If I had been sitting in precisely this place, writing this Blog in 2021, I would have said something like this: “Cathay Pacific carried a total of 54,092 passengers last month, an increase of +25.8% compared to July 2020, but a -98.4% decrease compared to the pre-pandemic level in July 2019.”

That 2019 level, albeit including Cathay Dragon (merged into Cathay Pacific in October 2020), was 3,278,742 passengers. Do the math – this July’s figure represents just 65.8% of its 2019 counterpart.

To digress for a moment, I rather liked Cathay’s announcement this week that it had created a sonic branding, Song of Cathay – a musical composition designed to forge deeper ties with customers and create an auditory expression of the airline’s purpose to move people forward (always better than flying backwards, I find) in life. You can discover the back story and listen to the full version via the YouTube links below. I rather like it.


A similar passenger traffic story, this time without a tune, plays out at Hong Kong International Airport, just a 60-second flight away from those hills in the distance. June passenger numbers reached 4.3 million, up +29.1% year-on-year but way, way short (-31.7%) of the 6.3 million in June 2019. Similarly, flight movements (29,590) were up +32.3% year-on-year but down -16.2% on 2019.

So I’m going to have to keep watching those hills and planes in the distance a while yet, listening for a different song of Cathay. Hoping for both the weather and travel sector haze to clear before we are, to quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s immortal last line in The Great Gatsby, “borne back ceaselessly into the past”. ✈️