Airline passenger traffic growth reversed by more than 2 decades during coronavirus: report
International travel saw a 68% drop in 2020 over the previous year
The global airline traffic industry has lost more than two decades' worth of passenger growth during the coronavirus pandemic, a new report suggests.
With the pandemic bringing unprecedented challenges to the travel industry amid international border shutdowns, airlines, in particular, will take years to bounce back, analysts say.
Between Jan. 1 to Dec. 20, there were 16.8 million passenger flights completed globally -- a 49% drop from the same time period in 2019 when 33.2 million flights were tracked, according to Cirium data. (iStock).
“Global passenger airline traffic in 2020 was reduced to 1999 levels. That means that some 21 years of growth was wiped out in a matter of months,” according to data from travel analytics company Cirium in its Airline Insights Review 2020 report.
Between Jan. 1 to Dec. 20, there were 16.8 million passenger flights completed globally — a 49% drop from the same time period in 2019 when 33.2 million flights were tracked, according to Cirium data.
There were 13 million scheduled passenger flights flown in 2020 and just 3.8 million international flights as a result international borders shutting down. To compare, 21.5 million domestic flights went out during the same time period in 2019, resulting in a 40% drop in domestic travel for 2020.
TSA SCREENED OVER 1.3 MILLION PASSENGERS SUNDAY, MOST SINCE START OF THE PANDEMIC
International travel, meanwhile, saw a 68% drop year-over-year due to the pandemic, with 11.7 million international passenger flights during the same time period in 2019, the Cirium report shows.
"It's going to be a while, possibly a few years, before we get back anywhere within the range of 2020 for a variety of reasons — are you going to need the COVID vaccine to travel?" Jon Jager, an analyst at Cirium, told FOX Business, anticipating fewer direct international flights even as the vaccine becomes more widely distributed.
"A lot of airlines these days are going to have to rely on their partners much more now as a result of this pandemic. If you think a lot of big U.S. carriers — American Airlines, Delta, United — they would typically fly from their hubs in the U.S. to their partners' but they would also fly to a certain point place — they'll probably increase frequencies to their partner's hub to carry secondary city travelers on smaller flights," Jager said.
Global tracking of revenue passenger kilometers — a metric which represents passenger traffic — has also shown a sharp decline in 2020 with just 2.9 trillion recorded, down from 8.7 trillion in 2019.
The busiest airports in 2020, globally, were ones in the U.S. and China, with Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas among the top three. Guangzhou, China, ranked No. 6, Chengdu was No. 7 and Shenzhen came in at No. 8, the first time that three Chinese airports have ranked among the top 10 busiest, showing a quick recovery for Chinese airlines during the pandemic and perhaps signaling that U.S. carriers may be able to make a speedy recovery, Cirium analysts note.
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Domestically, more Americans have traveled during the holidays. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened more than 1.3 million people at airports nationwide on Sunday, the highest reported passenger volume since the COVID-19 pandemic become widespread in March.