Charting the trends – looking back at 2020 from a country perspective

They say ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. In this regular section CTC – Corporate Travel Community offers a graphical insight into a key industry observation or trend. In this latest edition we use OAG schedule data to explore departure seat capacity changes between 2019 and 2020 and highlight the nations that saw the smallest and largest impact to their flight schedules from the COVID-19 pandemic.

This regular section also now incorporates and expands on the charts produced in the 2020 air capacity series ‘Coronavirus Statistics Snapshot’. These include a weekly look at how the pandemic is impacting global flight levels in the world’s largest markets; a week-on-week and year-on-year comparison of flight departures by geographical region and a look at how weekly capacity is trending: the latter comparing levels to 2020 and also to the 2019 baseline performance.

HEADLINE FIGURES FOR WEEK COMMENCING 04-Jan-2021:

Departure frequencies down -3.51% versus last week; down -43.26% versus 2020 and down -42.04% versus 2019.

Seat capacity down -3.94% versus last week; down -45.07% versus 2020 and down -43.15% versus 2019.

CHART: Week-on-week change in flight departures by region

CHART: Year-on-year weekly departure performance for world’s top 30 markets versus 2019

CHART: Year-on-year weekly departure performance for world’s top 30 markets versus 2020

CHART: Departure capacity trends with year-on-year performance

CHART: Departure capacity trends versus 2019