The number of passengers flying in and out of London has caught up with other international cities despite recent problems at UK airports, but a full Covid recovery is still to arrive.
In a recent blog we looked at how tourists have returned to London relative to other parts of the UK. But how does London measure up to other international cities? Data on traffic at airports gives some insight.
Covid hit traffic into London airports particularly hard. Figure 1 shows that while cities across the world saw daily air traffic plummet at the start of the pandemic, the British capital saw a much slower recovery than its international counterparts, such as Amsterdam and Paris, throughout 2020 and 2021. By the end of 2021, it was underperforming several global cities. Figure 2 shows London airports were seeing 64 per cent of activity in December last year compared to pre-pandemic levels, against 90 per cent in New York and 80 per cent in Paris and Amsterdam.
Source: Eurocontrol, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Notes: London’s data includes Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stanstead; Paris includes Charles-De-Gaulle and Orly. New York includes John F. Kennedy; Newark Liberty and LaGuardia. The remaining cities only include one airport.
Source: Eurocontrol, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Notes: London’s data includes Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stanstead; Paris includes Charles-De-Gaulle and Orly. New York includes John F. Kennedy; Newark Liberty; and LaGuardia. The remaining cities only include one airport.
This year has seen London stage a recovery. Activity rapidly increased at the start of 2022 and converged with (or even outperformed) the other cities analysed (Figure 3), with much of this resurgence happening up until May.
In the last couple of months, this recovery has plateaued and is still some 20-25 per cent below pre-pandemic levels. However, this flattening out is reflected across all the cities in Figure 3, suggesting it is a global issue, rather than just specific to London, and not driven by the recent well-documented issues that have been affecting airports across the UK.
Source: Eurocontrol, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Notes: London’s data includes Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stanstead; Paris includes Charles-De-Gaulle and Orly. New York includes John F. Kennedy; Newark Liberty and LaGuardia. The remaining cities only include one airport.
It is not clear whether this plateauing is temporary or a long-term impact of the pandemic. If, for example, fewer business trips are now happening as a result of the rise of Zoom and Teams, then there may be no full recovery. On the other hand, if it is the result of factors such as the war in Ukraine, then we should at some point expect a further increase. If this is true, the short-term problem is that air traffic historically has been a good tracker of economic performance. Such a drop would suggest that London’s Covid recovery is stuttering.
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