The Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd logo is displayed atop a building at Cathay Pacific City, the company's headquarters, in Hong Kong in August, 2018. Photo:VCG

Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific Airways on Wednesday said it is appealing to its staff to take rotating three-week unpaid leave until June, after announcing it had cut 90 percent of its flights to Chinese mainland in an attempt to deal with slumping demand amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.

"Today, we are appealing to all employees to participate in the special leave scheme, which will take effect from March 1 and last until June 30. All employees will have the option to take three weeks of unpaid leave in this period," reads a statement sent to the Global Times by the airline on Wednesday.

"Preserving cash is the key to protect our business. We have already been taking multiple measures to achieve this," the statement said.

Because of the virus crisis, multiple domestic and overseas airline have cancelled or reduced flights to Chinese mainland. Cathay Pacific suspended its flights to the epicenter of the outbreak Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province on January 24. 

The airline currently maintains flights to Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen in East China's Fujian Province and Chengdu in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, said the company's statement.

The airline had a tough year in 2019 amid the continuous unrest in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which led to a steep decline in the number of visits to the city from Chinese mainland travelers and from other countries and regions.

The Cathay Pacific Group on January 16 released its combined traffic figures for December 2019, stating that worldwide Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon carried 2,994,830 passengers in the month - a decline of 3.6 percent compared to December 2018.

Cathay Pacific Group Chief Customer and Commercial Officer Ronald Lam said that "demand for travel into Hong Kong continued to be weak in December with our inbound passenger traffic seeing a year-on-year decline of 46 percent - unchanged from November."