Staff shortages at airlines and ongoing country closures have made for a mixed recovery picture in the past week according to aviation intelligence company OAG.
Despite the challenges, the company said that airline capacity crept up with the addition of a further 1.5 million seats.
However, even with the marginal week-on-week capacity increase, airlines and airports are scrambling to deal with the almost 15 million seats removed for the remainder of April, with many of those in Europe and North East Asia.
Capacity in Western Europe was almost seven times higher in the past week compared to this time in 2021.
OAG also highlighted positive news from China with the addition of almost 950,000 seats in the past seven days but the country remains at -37 per cent of its 2019 levels.
Both North East and South East Asia are still struggling when it comes to recovery in airline capacity, down 42 per cent and 41 per cent on 2019 levels, respectively.
OAG said that travellers seem to be more cautious than their counterparts were when other markets reopened.
Overall, the data revealed that the US is now twice as large as China in terms of capacity, with the country within 10 per cent of 2019 levels.
In Western Europe, OAG cited Spain as a good example of the challenge of significant capacity increases with the country seeing a twelve-fold increase in capacity. Other European markets including the UK, Germany and France have seen six-fold increases.