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Asia-Pacific airlines report demand improvement in July: IATA
September 2nd 2021
While demand for air travel in the Asia-Pacific remained well below pre-pandemic levels in July, the size of the decline narrowed in the month, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said overnight. Read More » Revenue passenger kilometres (RPK) in the region were down 53.1% in the 31 days compared with levels recorded in July 2019. The figure was better than the 65.6% fall in June against June 2019 levels. The improvement could be attributed to domestic travel, given July's Asia-Pacific's international RPKs were 94.2% lower than same month levels in 2019 and little changed from the 94.6% drop in June this year. IATA said the Asia-Pacific faced some of the highest travel restrictions globally. "Overall, passenger traffic on most of the largest international routes such as Asia-North America and Asia-Europe remains subdued since long-haul connections are still largely closed," IATA said. The airline lobby group said the uncertainty about an air travel recovery is "rising sharply" due to the fast spread of the COVID-19 Delta variant worldwide, with the most increases of the strain being reported in Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America.
