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ASIA-PACIFIC AIRPORTS MAGAZINE
VIEWPOINT
VIEW FROM THE TOP Director general, Stefano Baronci, reflects on ACI Asia-Pacific’s efforts to support the region’s airports through COVID-19 and help reboot aviation as the global economy struggles to get back on track.
T
he restart and recovery phase for aviation is proving to be an uphill battle, a situation not helped by constantly changing travel restrictions and growing fears about a new wave of the pandemic that has already cost over 900,000 lives globally and virtually brought the world as we knew it to a standstill. Our ongoing response to the pandemic, of course, includes doing all we can to help and support our members through the crisis. It has been more than three months since the ACI Asia-Pacific COVID-19 Task Force produced its initial guidance document for the recovery of the airport sector. This was shortly followed by the ICAO Council’s Aviation Recovery Task Force (CART) Take-off guidance. Yet, well into the latter half of the year, travel is still significantly down with few signs that governments are ready to change their positions on lifting travel restrictions or quarantine requirements. In the face of this situation, our team has deployed a two-pronged approach to advocacy efforts with governmental agencies and consumer-confidence building activities.
TRAFFIC FORECAST
We are in uncharted territory, and with so many variables and no signs yet of a COVID-19 APA Issue 3, 2020
vaccine, it is almost impossible to know how long the current crisis will last. However, based on our latest analysis, ACI now forecasts that global passenger traffic volumes are not expected to recover to 2019 levels before 2023. And our data indicates that the markets which rely on significant volumes of international traffic might not recover until 2024. Specifically, for our region, ACI’s latest analysis predicts that passenger numbers in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East will decline by 55% and 60% respectively in 2020. This is all very different to our early year forecast made prior to the pandemic, when we expected that Asia-Pacific alone would handle close to 3.5 billion passengers in 2020. The revised full year estimate for AsiaPacific now predicts that just over 1.5 billion passengers will pass through its airports in 2020 – an unprecedented decline of around 1.9 billion travellers. Sadly, the Middle East will not fare much better, as we now expect it to handle just 170 million passengers in 2020 – a significant 250 million less than the 420 million passengers we predicted would be welcomed by its airports in our pre-COVID forecast. When we look at airport revenues, a direct reflection of traffic, they are forecasted to decline by approximately $27 billion in the
