Norske flypolasser på 90% av 2019 nivået - Aviation24.be

 Continued growth at Avinor’s Norwegian airports, now at 90% of 2019 pre-Covid figures

By

 André Orban

 -

10 October 2022

Oslo airport. Photo: Øystein Løwer, AVINOR

A total of 4,5 million passengers travelled through Avinor’s airports in September, which is an increase of 62 per cent compared to September the previous year. This shows that air traffic has continued to strengthen after the pandemic, but we also see that outbound and inbound international traffic is not picking up at the same pace as domestic flights.

Compared to 2019, which was the last normal year before the pandemic with five million passengers, nine out of ten passengers are back at Avinor’s airports in September, which shows that people’s travel habits are slowly but surely starting to normalise. Domestic traffic in September 2022 was now only 4 per cent below the same month in 2019. International traffic carried a total of 1.7 million passengers in September this year, compared to 2.1 million in September 2019. Here, eight out of ten passengers are back.

“We see that travel habits have changed, especially among business travellers, and this affects domestic travel patterns: a larger proportion of travel now takes place around weekends due to a stronger recovery in the holiday and leisure segment. The international market is probably more influenced by geopolitical factors such as the war in Ukraine and high fuel prices which are pulling down the number of passengers,” says Gaute Skallerud Riise, director of traffic development at Avinor.

Compared to September 2021, when we already began to notice that many countries were lifting corona restrictions, the figures we see now are good: at Norway’s main airport, Oslo Airport, the number of passengers jumped to 2,288,000, an increase of 88 per cent compared with the same month last year. Here, the increase has been greatest among international passengers, where the increase was as much as 161 per cent, finishing at 1,269,000 passengers. But despite strong growth compared with last year, we can see an indication that people are now sitting on the fence when it comes to travelling abroad.

“Rising interest rates, higher price levels for food and other consumer goods, as well as higher electricity prices may also be reasons why households are prioritising differently for the future and leisure travel is often given lower priority. Without coming to a conclusion, this may be one reason why the figures for international traffic have a weaker development,” says Riise.

It is nevertheless worth noting that international traffic so far this year has increased almost sixfold compared to the first nine months of 2021: the number of passengers has increased by 481 per cent, up from 2.2 million passengers to 12.8 million overall for Avinor as a whole.