A passenger checks the flight information on a board in the departure lounge of Madrid Barajas Airport.
Paul Hanna | Bloomberg | Getty Images
SINGAPORE – More than two decades of growth in air passenger traffic were wiped out in 2020, according to a new report.
“The pandemic and its aftermath ended 21 years of global passenger traffic growth in a matter of months, reducing traffic this year to levels last seen in 1999,” said Cirium, an analysis and data company. of travel.
“Compared to last year, it is estimated that passenger traffic will fall by 67% in 2020,” the firm said in a press release.
Only 2.9 trillion kilometers of global passenger revenue (RPK) was recorded in 2020, up from 8.7 trillion in 2019. RPKs are used as a measure of air traffic.
The aviation industry was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic as countries closed their borders in an attempt to curb the spread of the disease.
According to Cirium data, airlines operated 16.8 million flights from January 1 to December 20, 2020. This has dropped from 33.2 million in the same period in 2019.
More than 40 airlines have stopped or completely suspended their operations and experts expect them to fail further in 2021, according to Cirium.
Road to recovery
Asia-Pacific and North America were “the fastest to establish themselves on the long road to recovery,” according to the Cirium Airline Insights Review 2020 report.
This trend was reflected in the list of the busiest airports in the world, which was dominated by the airports of the US and China.
Recognizing that major cities such as New York, Beijing and Shanghai were missing from the list, David White, Cirium’s vice president of strategy, told CNBC that it appears airports like New York’s John F. Kennedy have been “disproportionately impacted of its international traffic in normal times “.
“Airports like Minneapolis, O’Hare (Chicago), [Dallas-Fort Worth], Atlanta and Charlotte have significantly higher traffic than now JFK due to the volume of domestic flights at these domestic central airports, “he said. A similar pattern was reported. observed at some Chinese airports.
International flights fell 68% from 2019, while domestic flights fell 40%.
Cirium expects passenger demand for air travel to recover in 2024 or 2025, with domestic and leisure traffic being the first segments to show a “sustained recovery”.