Chinese Travel Demand Surges During Labour Day Holiday

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

Global Departure Update

Looking at data up to 1 May 2023:

• Average global departures have remained above 120,000 per day, up 1.1% WoW and 5.9% above 2019 levels (Chart 1).
• The demand for travel during the Labour Day holiday has surpassed pre-Covid levels in China. Quanar.com data showed a 23% increase in domestic hotel bookings for the five-day holiday compared to the same period in 2019. Alternative data providers backed the claim with departures increasing from outside of the country, too (Charts 3 and 4). Meanwhile, our previous Flight Tracker found international flights remain below pre-Covid levels, which should continue as the EU continues to remove Covid-19 restrictions on travellers from China.
• The bulk of European airports saw departures slip over the past week (-0.7% WoW) as spring holidays concluded while American departures recovered from recent slowdowns in departures.

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

China

Japan

Hong Kong

South Korea

Singapore

Thailand

US

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany

France

Canada

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.

Photo Credit: depositphotos.com

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