Air traffic is booming this summer, but after European vacations are over, will passenger demand hold up?
The question was the focus of the annual congress of the Airports Council International (ACI) Europe in Rome this week, held at the cusp of the approaching peak season.
The summer period is shaping up to be by far the best since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis that has severely affected the airline industry since 2020.
Photo: Reuters
Some airlines, such as Ryanair Holdings PLC, and countries, in particular Greece, have recovered or even exceeded their 2019 daily flight numbers, aviation agency Eurocontrol said.
Across the continent, air traffic was last week at 86 percent of the same period in 2019, and expected to reach up to 95 percent in August under its most optimistic estimate, Eurocontrol said.
Companies are filling seats for the coming weeks despite the sharp rise in ticket prices, long lines in airports from Frankfurt to Dublin to Amsterdam, and strikes by flight attendants, pilots and air traffic controllers.
“Visibility is low because there is a lot of uncertainty,” ACI Europe director-general Olivier Jankovec said. “We’re now in a war economy in Europe, we have the prospect of a quite harsh recession, we have inflation at record levels, so how all of this is going to play into consumer sentiment... the jury’s still out.”
The director-general for transport and mobility at the European Commission, Henrik Hololei, echoed that thought.
“We really need to tighten the seat belt because there’s going to be a lot of turbulence,” he told delegates. “We are entering... a period of uncertainty which we have never experienced in the last decade, and that of course is the biggest enemy of the business,” he said.
Hololei listed the Ukraine war, high energy prices, rising interest rates, and shortages of energy, food and labor.
The price of jet fuel has doubled over the past year, with a refinery capacity shortage compounding the explosion in crude oil prices. Fuel accounts for about a quarter of the operating costs of airlines, which have passed increases to consumers in ticket prices as they seek to refill coffers drained by the two-year health crisis.
Athens International Airport general manager Yiannis Paraschis expressed fears that “the increase in energy costs and inflation will consume a great part of European households’ disposable income.”
The head of Istanbul International Airport, Kadri Samsunlu, voiced concerns about inflation’s effect in Western Europe.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen to the demand” if consumer confidence is damaged, he said.
The last unknown hanging over European air travel in the medium term is a possible new COVID-19 outbreak.
"COVID has not disappeared, and it is not a seasonal flu either," Hololei said.
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