LOGINHas travel been affected by the coronavirus, and if so by how much and where? The overall volume of passengers traveling by air affects many of disparate industries - not just airlines but travel sites and aggregators that sell tickets, hotels and car rental companies that rely on airports for a large volume of their business, credit card companies, restaurants and retailers. The list can go on.
To try and gauge the impact that a reduction in travel due to the coronavirus might be having on these sectors and more, we analyzed foot traffic in key US and international airports.
First, within the US, we looked at the largest airports for international passengers: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Franscisco, as well as Atlanta, which is a major airport hub.
Measuring the average daily visitors in each airport we can see that the West Coast airports, and to a lesser extent, Chicago O'Hare, show a significant drop in traffic between January and February, compared to the previous 3 years. Los Angeles, in particular, saw a drop of almost 7% in traffic from January to February of this year, whereas in previous years the trend was more or less flat.
This is a clear indicator that air travel to and from Asia is starting to show identifiable weakness.
While the month over month change is material, on a day-to-day basis we do not observe any pronounced changes. The chart below shows year-to-date traffic on a daily basis. The effects are mild compared, for example, to the weather delays in Boston and Chicago on Saturday, January 11.
The picture in international airports, however, is materially different. Hong Kong, Seoul and Vancouver have large and statistically significant drops from prior years, with Hong Kong and Seoul the most affected.
This drop in foot traffic for international airports is also visible in the daily traffic trends:
More in depth analysis traffic across all US airports as well as the major US airlines is already available in Advan's graphical interface, Excel API and data feeds. Daily historical airport traffic on any international airport, or any international location for that matter, can be generated on the fly using REveal, Advan's online platform.
For more insights into how this trend is affecting airport retailers, see this article from today's Wall Street Journal: Airport shops suffer crisis as Coronavirus upends travel, WSJ, March 3, 2020
