A passenger checks 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 airline passenger traffic was wiped out in 2020, a new report found.
“The pandemic and its aftermath ended 21 years of growth in global passenger traffic in a matter of months, reducing traffic this year to the levels last seen in 1999,” said Cirium, a travel data and analytics company.
“Compared to last year, passenger traffic is expected to drop 67% in 2020,” the company said in a press release.
Only 2.9 trillion passenger-kilometers of global revenue (RPKs) were recorded in 2020, against 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. That’s less than 33.2 million in the same period in 2019.
More than 40 airlines have closed or completely suspended operations and experts expect more to fail in 2021, according to Cirium.
Path to recovery
Asia-Pacific and North America were “the fastest established on the long road to recovery,” according to Cirium’s Airline Insights Review 2020 report.
This trend was reflected in Cirium’s list of the busiest airports in the world, dominated by airports in the United States and China.
Recognizing that large cities like New York, Beijing and Shanghai were absent from the list, David White, Cirium’s vice president of strategy, told CNBC that it appears that airports like New York’s John F. Kennedy were “disproportionately affected due to their international traffic at normal times. “
“Airports like Minneapolis, O’Hare (Chicago), [Dallas-Fort Worth], Atlanta and Charlotte have significantly more traffic than JFK now due to the volume of domestic flights at these central airports, “he said. A similar pattern has been reported observed in some Chinese airports.
International flights fell 68% compared to 2019, while domestic travel 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 “sustained recovery”.