Over 50% fliers want to wait six months to a year before resuming air travel: IATA

Gaining passenger confidence in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic will pose a major challenge for the aviation industry, as fliers are reluctant to resume air travel,

Gaining passenger confidence in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic will pose a major challenge for the aviation industry, as fliers are reluctant to resume air travel, revealed an international survey conducted by International Air Transport Association (IATA).

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The results of the survey, which were released by the trade association of world’s airlines as part of a webinar on Thursday, were based on the responses of 4,700 individuals from across 11 countries including India and the US.

“More than 50% of air travellers said they would resume air travel only after waiting for at least six months. Whereas, 95% of the respondents said they would resume air travel in a year,” said Amitabh Khosla, IATA’s director, at the webinar titled ‘Restoring confidence in air travel’ organised by US-India Aviation Cooperation Program. “There is a major problem in gaining the passenger confidence at the moment,” he said.

Findings also showed that in March, 60% of respondents had said they would return to air travel in a couple of months. This view changed in the second round of the survey, with only 45% of respondents preferring air travel in the next two months.

Results showed that 83% of recent travelers in India said they would not consider traveling if it involved a 14-day quarantine period. “To regain passenger confidence in air travel, there is a need to build better travel insurance,” Khosla said.

Nishant Pitti, co-founder of Easemytrip.com said current times are very uncertain for the air travel industry, with the majority of passengers travelling only for essential purposes.

“With increasing acceptance for the situation, and sentiments turning positive, air travel is expected to recover slowly and move towards normalcy,” said Pitti. “Multiple research organisations are also working towards curing this virus, and travel will revive exponentially once any high-efficacy medicine or vaccine is developed. We are seeing 20% of business back now,” he added.

Sabina Chopra, co-founder and chief operating officer of corporate travel and head industry relations of Yatra.com said that with the recommencement of domestic flight operations, their portal has witnessed demand shaping up for flight services on various routes by almost 30% from pre-Covid times.

“Apart from popular metro routes, there has been a growth in demand for non-metro routes such as Ranchi and Patna among others. Almost 90% of the bookings are for the next two weeks as travellers are slowly gaining confidence to travel and are being cautious,” said Chopra. “We can expect the travel sector to make a gradual comeback and pick up, especially during the holiday season of October-December,” she said.

CSMIA sees increase in flights

Post the resumption of domestic commercial passenger flight operations from May 25, Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) has handled 2,01,258 passengers (1,40,878 departing and 60,380 arriving), with a total of 1,744 domestic flights between May 25 and June 24. These flights were operated by 10 airlines to 34 sectors in the country. The airport saw the highest passenger load capacity on the Mumbai–Delhi route (41,206 passengers), followed closely by Mumbai-Kolkata (22,778 passengers), Mumbai-Varanasi (18,812 passengers) and Mumbai-Patna (17,784 passengers). “With the recent grant by the Maharashtra government to double the commercial passenger flight movements, the airport saw six new sectors added to the existing schedule. The sectors include Trivandrum, Coimbatore, Raipur, Udaipur, Jabalpur, and Jalgaon,” said a CSMIA spokesperson.