Date Published: 22/10/2020
ARCHIVED - September passenger numbers down by 80 per cent at Spanish airports
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
90 per cent fewer international travellers as the second wave of Covid hits air travel
The collapse of the air travel sector and international tourism due to the coronavirus pandemic is amply illustrated by the latest figures to be published by Aena, which runs almost all of Spain’s airports, with a total of just 5.46 million passengers reported to have passed through terminal buildings in this country during the month of September.
This represents a calamitous fall of 79.9 per cent in comparison with September 2019, despite the number of flights having dropped less drastically by 50.9 per cent during the month, and the discrepancy may reflect the unwillingness of potential passengers to travel on the flights which have not been removed from schedules only to shut themselves away in quarantine on arrival at their destination.
Quite possibly it is for this reason that the number of people arriving in Spain or leaving on international flights fell even more sharply than the overall total, by 89.8 per cent, while the figure for those using domestic flights was “only” 56 per cent down from September last year.
It goes without saying that none of the major airports in Spain has been exempt from the loss of traffic, and while in September Madrid-Barajas was once again the busiest with just under a million passengers this represents a drop of 82.3 per cent. The main airports serving the Costas continued to illustrate the disastrous effect of the pandemic on the tourist industry, with the falls reported including those of 83.5 per cent at Barcelona-El Prat, 86.4 per cent at Palma de Mallorca, 81.9 per cent at Málaga-Costa del Sol, 70 per cent at Gran Canaria and 76 per cent at Ibiza.
The airport of Alicante-Elche registered 256,993 passengers during September (a fall of 83.4 per cent which contributes to a drop of 72.4 per cent in the first nine months of the year), while the nearby Region of Murcia International Airport in Corvera was used by only 17,164 passengers, 86.9 per cent fewer than in September 2019. The cumulative total at Corvera airport for 2020 now stands at 202,667, having dropped to just 22.4 per cent of the level reached by the same point last year, and with the second wave of the pandemic having spread still further since the end of September it appears that no recovery is likely during the remainder of the year.