Revenues from air travel fell 53.1% in July 2021 compared to the same month in 2019, the IATA reported.
Although the rebound in global air travel continued for another month thanks to the willingness to travel during the northern hemisphere summer.
Industry-wide revenue per passenger-kilometer (RPK) fell 53.1% in July 2021 from July 2019 compared to a 60.0% contraction in June.
What are RPKs? They are the number of passengers transported multiplied by the distance traveled.
On a month-on-month basis, RPKs rallied 8.0 percent.
Among key domestic markets, IATA noted, Russia posted the best performance for another month, backed by a boom in domestic tourism.
On the other hand, the recovery was reversed in Australia amid new travel restrictions imposed to combat the new wave of Covid-19.
International traffic improved slightly in all regions, but remained well below 2019 levels.
Air travel
At the same time, bookings for August travel have dwindled.
The weakness has been largely driven by China‘s domestic market, where the latest Covid-19 outbreak led to the closure of many major routes.
From IATA’s perspective, the global recovery in air travel improved in July, supported by the launch of vaccines and an appetite for travel during the northern hemisphere’s traditionally busy summer.
All the regions IATA tracked this month contributed to the rally, most significantly Europe (data for Africa not available this month).
Positive developments continued in the domestic markets of the United States and Brazil, where the contraction of the domestic RPK decreased to 7.7 and 19.6%, respectively (both compared to July 2019 levels).
In both countries, the launch of the vaccine has been one of the main contributors to the travel recovery.
In the remaining three key national markets (Japan, India and Australia), passenger volumes were down 50-60% in July 2021 compared to two years ago.
However, while there has been some improvement in India and Japan recently, the recovery in traffic was reversed in Australia amid new stringent restrictions to limit the spread of the Delta variant (RPK decline accelerated by 24 points, to -75, 4%, compared to July 2021).
