The International Air Transport Association (IATA) expects next year to witness a full recovery of passenger traffic in the Middle East, indicating that the aviation industry is on the right track with a strong start to the year 2023.
Kashif Khalid, Regional Director for the Middle East and Africa at IATA, said on the sidelines of the recently held Global Airport Leaders Forum, that the numbers currently registered by the aviation industry are close to the levels before the Corona pandemic (Covid-19) in 2019, as the movement constitutes about 88 % of 2019 numbers, which means we are approaching pre-pandemic levels. With China’s recent reopening, we can expect to see pre-2019 levels within the next few months.
He added that the Middle East region leads the global recovery, which has reached about 93% of pre-COVID-19 levels, and we expect very soon that the recovery in the Middle East, especially Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, will reach 100%, while a full recovery is expected. In passenger traffic in the Middle East in 2024, it will grow by 4.2% annually until 2040.
And the Regional Director for the Middle East and Africa at IATA continued, saying: “If we look at the economics and financing of airlines, the Middle East is the only region that is preparing to achieve profits in the year 2023, and if we look at the performance of Qatar Airways and other companies operating in the Gulf region such as Emirates Airlines. And flydubai, we will find that all of them have provided strong growth rates, regained their capacity and are looking forward to achieving record profits this year.
Experts in the global travel and tourism sector confirm that summer flight reservations for this year have reached record rates for most airlines, especially European ones, despite the high ticket prices, as a result of people giving greater priority to travel, which indicates the sector’s transformation into profitability during the current year.
The aviation sector was one of the economic sectors most affected by the “Corona” virus, as the losses incurred by it are estimated at about 10 percent of the total losses of the world’s economies, which exceeded $ 21 trillion as a result of the pandemic. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) suggested that the aviation sector would return to profitability in 2023, with the continued recovery of air traffic after more than two years of restrictions related to “Covid-19”, expecting to achieve a net profit of $ 4.7 billion and register more than 4 billion passengers. .
These expectations were reinforced by the global air travel data for the month of February 2023, which confirms the continued recovery of the sector and the increase in travel rates during the current year, as IATA announced that the total air travel movement in February (measured in passenger revenue per kilometer) increased by 55.5 percent compared to February 2022. .
