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Africa Accounts For 1.9% World Air Travel – IATA

The world’s apex air transportation body, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), has said Africa accounted for 1.9 per cent of the total world passenger air travel market.
IATA in its latest data record analysis, which The Tide accessed, has revealed that the Africa’s air travel demand as at May 2022, stood at 9.1 percent, in comparison with the global air travel demand.
In the IATA’s latest analysis of demand for passenger air travel worldwide, and by region, which is based on traffic data collected during May 2022 as compared to same period in the previous year, African airlines recorded a 134.9 per cent rise in Revenue Passenger Kilometres flown.
In the same analysis, the IATA said African Airlines increased capacity by 78.5 per cent and also achieved a 16.4 percentage point rise in the average load factor per flight, taking it to 68.4 per cent.
The apex global air transportation body, however, noted that this was the lowest among all regions worldwide, with respect to travel and aviation industry business.
Director General of IATA, Willie Walsh, said, “The travel recovery continues to gather momentum. People need to travel. And when governments remove COVID-19 restrictions, they do.
“Many major international route areas, including within Europe, and the Middle East, North America routes, are already exceeding pre-COVID-19 levels.
“Completely removing all COVID-19 restrictions is the way forward, with Australia being the latest to do so.
“The major exception to the optimism of this rebound in travel is China, which saw a dramatic 73.2 per cent fall in domestic travel compared to the previous year. Its continuing zero-COVID policy is out-of-step with the rest of the world and it shows in the dramatically slower recovery of China-related travel”, he stated.
By: Corlins Walter