China Prepares for Golden Week

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 26 September:

• Global departures have jumped higher (+2.2%) WoW, following a five week decline as summer demand peaked (Chart 1).
• The upcoming Golden Week (1 October – 7 October) celebrations have revived falling Asia (+11.0% WoW) departures. The effect was particularly noticeable in Shanghai (+48.6% WoW), with Beijing (+8.0% WoW) also benefitting.
• In China, hotel reservations have now surpassed pre-Covid levels. It comes as China mulls reopening its border to some foreign tourists, though it would be limited to distinctive border tourism destinations. It could allow the areas to specify flexible entry and exit ports and remove travel preconditions. Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong have relaxed quarantine measures for international arrivals. It means, as of yesterday (26 September), international arrivals will no longer be required to undergo three days of centralised hotel quarantine. They will, instead, be able to self-monitor at home. Meanwhile, departures from Tokyo (HAN: +14.3% WoW; NAR: +7.3% WoW) recovered sharply following last week’s typhoon.
• Departures from Europe (+1.9% WoW) and the US (-0.2% WoW) are stalling but have yet to meaningly fall as we enter Autumn (Chart 2).

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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