European Departures Drop 10.9% Since September

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 21 November:

• Global departures have increased (+1.5%) WoW for the first time since the first week of October. Historic seasonality suggests flights tend to increase toward Christmas (Chart 1).
• Since China eased domestic zero-Covid restrictions, searches for flights to China have soared as several cities cancelled or suspended mass PCR testing and Covid-19 curbs on domestic group trips are relaxed. However, surging Covid-19 cases and new testing requirements (for Beijing as of 22 November) have followed the easing. Departures have continued to diverge (Beijing: -8.2% WoW; Shanghai: +8.6% WoW). Elsewhere in Asia, departures keep grinding higher (+1.0% WoW).
• Europe is lagging: departures have fallen 10.9% since the beginning of October (-0.5% WoW). In comparison, departures from the US have moderated 0.8% over the same period (+2.0% 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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