Global passenger traffic fell by 65.9 per cent in 2020 compared to the full year of 2019, by far the sharpest traffic decline in aviation history, IATA has announced.
International traffic was down 75.6 per cent on 2019 levels while domestic demand was down 48.8 per cent.
“Last year was a catastrophe. There is no other way to describe it. What recovery there was over the Northern hemisphere summer season stalled in autumn and the situation turned dramatically worse over the year-end holiday season, as more severe travel restrictions were imposed in the face of new outbreaks and new strains of Covid-19,” said Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s director general and CEO.
The Middle East and Europe saw the biggest declines in traffic, at 72.2 per cent and 69.9 per cent respectively.
Capacity on international routes for Europe’s airlines fell by 66.3 per cent year-on-year with load factor down 18.8 percentage points to 66.8 per cent.
Domestically, China and Russia showed signs of recovery at the end of 2020, although demand is still below 2019.
IATA said that bookings for future travel were falling sharply, down 70 per cent in January on a year-ago, putting further pressure on airline cash positions and potentially impacting the timing of the expected recovery.
The airline body predicted a 50.4 per cent improvement on 2020 demand for 2021 but that improvement would leave the traffic at just over half of 2019’s levels. In a scenario where more severe travel restrictions are implemented in response to new Covid variants, 2021 traffic could fall as low as 38 per cent of 2019 levels.
De Juniac said, “Optimism that the arrival and initial distribution of vaccines would lead to a prompt and orderly restoration in global air travel have been dashed in the face of new outbreaks and new mutations of the disease. The world is more locked down today than at virtually any point in the past 12 months and passengers face a bewildering array of rapidly changing and globally uncoordinated travel restrictions.”