Cathay Pacific Airways reported a 5.4 percent growth in European flight traffic for October 2019 compared to October 2018, despite ongoing civil unrest in Hong Kong, the carrier’s home city.

The carrier also saw 1.4 percent growth to the Southwest Pacific.

All other regions saw weaker demand, with Mainland China taking the biggest hit at 21.9 percent drop in demand.

Cathay Pacific and its subsidiary, Cathay Dragon, flew more than 2.74 million people on 6,777 flights in October, down overall 7.1 percent from October 2018.

Ronald Lam, the airline group’s chief customer and commercial officer, says this is a “challenging time” for the company.

“In response to weakened travel sentiment to and from Hong Kong, we have so far reduced our passenger flight capacity against our original schedule by 2–4% between August and October, and 6–7% for November and December,” Lam said. “In October, demand for travel into Hong Kong remained weak with our inbound passenger traffic seeing a year-on-year decline of 35%, consistent with the trend seen in both August and September. The drop in outbound Hong Kong traffic was 13% in October, again similar to the trend over the past two months. Transit traffic via Hong Kong remained relatively less affected.”