China Reopening Boosts Global Flight Departures

We track scheduled flights (what’s planned) and tracked flights (what took off) from a sample of the largest airports across the world.

Looking at data up to 23 January 2023:

• Global departures sit at 103,000 per day, a touch lower than last week, but a level comparable to 2019 and just shy of the levels they were before Covid-19 struck in 2020 (Chart 1). The return to 2019 levels is largely due to the China re-opening.
• The China re-opening will continue to find new steam with the country to resume outbound group travel. Starting 6 February, groups of up to 20 will be allowed to travel to Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Maldives, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Laos, the UAE, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Russia, Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Fiji, Cuba, and Argentina. The chosen countries seem purposeful, following recent tighter restrictions imposed on Chinese travellers across several countries with Malaysia the only the list to follow, and lightly so. Despite the recent improvements, departures are down across Asia (-0.2% WoW) with Beijing (-6.6% WoW) leading the weakness (Charts 2 and 4).
• Good news does not carry west. Departures have dropped 19.7% from their peak in Europe, with London Gatwick (-43.5%) and Munich (-33.6%) driving the weakness, while they have dropped 9.1% similarly in the US, despite the recent good news over the past week (US: +1.6% WoW).

Information on long-term movements in flight data is available below.

US

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany

France

Canada

China

Japan

Hong Kong

South Korea

Singapore

Thailand

Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Head of Research at Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

Ben Ford is a Researcher at Macro Hive. Ben studied BSc Financial Mathematics at Cardiff University and MSc Finance at Cass Business School, his dissertations were on the tails of GARCH volatility models, and foreign exchange investment strategies during crises, respectively.

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