Connections

With rolling lockdowns and airport closures, Covid-19 prompted some dramatic shifts in tourist and business activity. Liam Bailey comments on a new view of flight data analysed by Ruth Wetters of Knight Frank’s Analytics team that pinpoints which cities are becoming more – or less – critical as world hubs

The pandemic undoubtedly redrew the map of global connectivity. Using data on flight connections to and from the world’s 100 biggest airport hubs, our Analytics team was able to analyse and visualise this shift. We took two views to understand this: first, a simple count of connections to other airports; and second, an assessment of the quality of these links, i.e. a link to an airport with high onward connections scores higher than an airport with limited connections.

On the two network maps the most connected cities are enlarged and pulled to the centre, while those with fewer, weaker connections are pushed to the periphery. Cities also gravitate towards their main regional connections. To give a pre-Covid view, we ran the data for the year to March 2020; for a post-Covid update we then ran it again for the year up to December 2022. While a host of other criteria impact on the findings, the pandemic dominates.

The clearest change is the dramatic weakening of the centrality of Chinese cities. With the data covering a period of zero-Covid rules and lockdowns this is hardly surprising, and when we run this data again later in 2023 the impact of China’s January reopening should become apparent.

Other stories emerging include the relentless rise of Dubai as a global hub, moving from second place in 2020 to joint first with London in 2022. We thought there might be a Brexit-related story in Frankfurt and Amsterdam’s rise, but this neat assumption was undone by Paris’s slip from fifth to sixth place. Istanbul’s rise points to Turkey’s strategic importance, despite ongoing economic turmoil.

Finally, Singapore’s arrival in our top 10 for 2022 underlines the city-state’s steadily increasing global significance, a trend we pointed to in The Wealth Report 2022.

For more on the growing importance of Dubai and Singapore, turn back to page 10 for insights from some immigration specialists.

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