Looking at a few selected markets, we can see how domestic air travel is recovering. The US data is most recent, through September. China and India are through August, while Canada and Australia are through July. Domestic air traffic recoveries vary widely.
Using January 2019 as the base year, we can see that China and Canada show strong traffic recovery. The bashed line of 100 is the base period, anything above that is real growth.
Of course, not all markets are equal. The next chart shows the relative size and the volumes involved.
The US market remains the largest by some margin. But note how rapidly China’s recovery is creeping up. The curves show that China tried, valiantly, during the pandemic to get its airline traffic back up. But successive waves of Covid undermined the efforts. China spent much of 2021 eradicating the pandemic and this year has seen a continuous recovery.
Among the other countries, Canada seems to be on a steady recovery rate. India too, but with some bumps along the way. Australia’s draconian pandemic shutdowns have left the market far weaker – it should be approximately the size of Canada’s. But it remains ~40% behind Canada.
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