Flights to Italy, air traffic still far from pre-Covid levels

In 2021, airline flight searches for Italy hardly exceeded those of 2020: especially regarding the summer months, market volumes are similar, and we are still far from recovering the figures from early 2020.

If we look back (at least one and a half years ago), we could gradually re-read all the forecasts estimated by the many tourism professionals who undertook the arduous task. It was (and still is) a difficult, almost impossible task considering how quickly the scenario changes and how many variables continuously influence tourist flows.

Disproved optimistic scenarios

Today, we can start to sum up, as the start of the school year unofficially marks the end of the summer season: indeed, the end of the first summer season post-pandemic. Among negative, optimistic, and hyper-optimistic forecasts, we can now definitely say that scenarios predicting full recovery as early as 2021 have been disproved. Regarding flight demand, in 2021, Italian airports continued to suffer the heavy legacy of the previous year, despite the easing of restrictions and an improvement in the health situation.

The summer months were emblematic: during July, flight searches increased by 12.5% compared to the previous year, while in August, they increased by 30.5%. These seem, overall, very positive growth figures, but this judgment must be weighed against pre-pandemic values: consider that flight searches for the month of January 2020 were 34.7 million, and in 2021, 5.0 million. An 85% loss in travel demand.

Tourism has changed a lot during this period: in the chosen destinations, in forms of accommodation, in customer priorities. For example, we know that much outbound tourism has transformed into domestic tourism, that some types of destinations suffered more than others, and that smart working has launched the Holiday working: we still don’t know how many and which changes will solidify into new trends, but certainly 2021 was not the year of the “boom”. It was a year of change, imbalance, and restart: factors that will heavily influence the future structure of the sector while waiting for the return of volumes we are accustomed to.