European traffic in August, as good as it gets for now?

The August traffic numbers are in

I’ve updated the passenger traffic figures that I shared in my earlier post which tracked the recovery of the European airline market. What do the August figures tell us about how the recovery is going and which airlines and airports are doing better?

The ultra low-cost carriers lead the way in short-haul

Low-cost carriers continued to lead the charge in short-haul. Passenger volumes hit 59% of last year’s level at Wizz and 47% at Ryanair. Unfortunately I don’t have August passenger figures for easyJet, or even for their main airport base Gatwick, so it is not clear to me how well they did.

The short-haul traffic at the main European hubs also continued to improve. Again, I’ve included low-cost carrier dominated Stansted for comparison. The stronger growth by the ULCCs finally dragged that airport off the bottom of the chart and into third place. Paris continued to take top spot, thanks to the large French domestic market where traffic achieved 62% of last year. European traffic at Paris was only 34% of last year, much more in line with other airports.

Long-haul continues to recover, but is still a fraction of normal levels

Long-haul continued to lag behind in terms of recovery, but volumes were clearly ahead of July as carriers began to reintroduce capacity.

Once again, Paris was the stand-out winner in overall volume terms. France is pretty unique in terms of having long-haul markets in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean which are actually “domestic” markets, the so-called overseas territories. Dramatically better performance on those markets and to a lesser extent for Africa was behind the stronger figures. Traffic to the Americas and Asia was every bit as bad as from other hubs. Incidentally, I defined Africa as “long-haul”, whereas in truth much of that was probably short-haul to North Africa.

How is September looking?

The final set of updated figures I have to share are the weekly numbers from Frankfurt. They show performance clearly peaking in early August and then declining later in the month and into September, even on a “versus last year” basis.

As we head into the winter season, it is increasingly looking to me like the August figures may be as good as it gets in 2020. I do think there will be some bright spots like the Caribbean, as I explained in this post, and maybe there will be good news on introducing a testing regime which can open up some currently closed borders. But with the business travel recovery still looking some way away and pandemic news flow generally negative, I think that the short-term outlook looks quite bleak.

It is going to be a long, cold winter for Europe’s airlines.