The global airport industry is expected to lose about 64.2 percent of its passengers – or more than 6 billion passengers – for calendar year 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to quash demand for air travel, Airports Council International (ACI) World said in its fifth COVID-19 economic impact analysis, published Tuesday.
North America is expected to fare slightly better than the global average, with a projected decline of 63.6 percent for the year.
Broadly speaking, the global trade organization is projecting that domestic passenger traffic will recover to 2019 levels in the second half of 2023, under a baseline scenario where effective vaccines are distributed by the latter half of 2021 and consumer enthusiasm for travel remains strong. International passenger traffic under the baseline scenario is expected to fully recover by the end of 2024.
But ACI warned that vaccine disruptions, economic downturn and general angst about traveling could warrant more dire predictions.
“In the long run, it is predicted that the global traffic may take up to two decades to return to previously projected levels (pre-COVID-19 forecast). A structural change (traffic will never return to pre-COVID-19 forecasted level) is still a possibility,” ACI said in its report.
“We are now seeing some positive signs and prospects are slightly better for recovery but there is still a long way to go,” ACI World Director General Luis Felipe de Oliveira said. “One thing is certain, the world will be different after this pandemic.” He advocated for a consistent approach to testing “to promote travel and do away with restrictive quarantine measures with a coordinated and risk-based approach to combining testing and vaccination introduced going forward.”
ACI predicted a slow start to 2021 as vaccine distribution gains traction. Global passenger traffic volume for the first half of 2021 is forecast to reach 2.2 billion, a slim 20 percent increase compared to the same period in 2020. The second half of 2021 will see a much stronger uptick, reaching more than 3.5 billion passengers, more than double the passenger volume for the same period in 2020.
International passenger traffic continued to be virtually non-existent in the second half of 2020 following the “Great Lockdown” of April. International passenger volume will remain weak in the first half of 2021 but will pick up in the second half of the year as an increasing number of people get vaccinated, and travel restriction are gradually lifted, the ACI report said.
Of course, the downturn in demand resulted in sharply lower revenue throughout the airport industry. ACI had projected that the global airport industry would generate about $172 billion in 2020, but with the COVID-19 crisis impact, that figure is expected to be off dramatically. The industry is expected to generate roughly $61 billion in 2020, 65 percent short of the pre-COVID-19 forecast.
