European air traffic recovery snuffed out by second wave
The nascent recovery in European air travel faltered in September
In an earlier post, I looked at how traffic was recovering at key European airports. We now have the September figures and as expected, they confirm that passenger volumes have fallen back as the second wave of the pandemic has hit Europe.
Short-haul traffic
Short-haul passenger volumes at key European airports dropped compared to August, both in terms of absolute volume but also when measured as a percentage of last year.
Paris remained the strongest performer, but Heathrow declined less than other airports and was the second best performer in the month.
Source: aena.es, heathrow.com, fraport.com, schipol.nl, parisaeroport.fr, magairports.com, GridPoint analysis
I don’t yet have figures for Madrid. The total airport figures have been published and were down from 23% of last year in August to 18% in September. However I cannot get the section of AENA’s website which would allow me to break down the figures to load. I guess they’ve laid off too many IT staff.
We also have monthly figures for the big low-cost airlines. These show the same pattern of a faltering recovery. Even Wizz, who had been boasting about getting back to 80% of last year’s capacity levels in August, were forced to reduce capacity in the face of poor load factors and falling demand. Despite dropping capacity in September to 60% of last year, with a load factor of only 64.6%, its passenger numbers are now only marginally higher compared to last year than the other two.
Source: wizzair.com, ryanair.com, easyjet.com, GridPoint analysis
With traffic running at 30-40% of last year, these carriers are still ahead of the 20-30% we saw earlier for the big European hub airports. But that 10 point difference is I think entirely explained by the weakness of connecting traffic to long-haul destinations. I don’t think that the low-cost carriers are gaining share of the point to point market.
Long-haul
Long-haul traffic didn’t fall back as much in September and actually continued to climb at both Amsterdam and Heathrow. However it still lags the short-haul recovery by 10 percentage points or more. It is being held back by the moribund North Atlantic market, which recorded figures of only 5% of last year at Heathrow, for example.
Source: aena.es, heathrow.com, fraport.com, schipol.nl, parisaeroport.fr, GridPoint analysis
Paris is still doing better, again propped up by the large market to French overseas territories which do not have travel restrictions and are running at 59% of last year. This demonstrates that it is government imposed restrictions and quarantine requirements that are having the biggest impact on demand, rather than reluctance of travellers to fly.
As I heard it put quite nicely recently by KLM’s CEO, people are not afraid to fly, they are afraid to arrive.
