Eight months after domestic air travel reclaimed pre-pandemic highs for the first time, the number of international passengers checking into India’s airports finally marked the feat only in July, data from the Airports Authority of India (AAI) showed. Indian airports handled 5.78 million international passengers in July, 1.3% more than July 2019. This includes all passengers using international flights—Indians as well as foreigners.
India had lifted pandemic-related curbs on overseas flights in March 2022. Before the pandemic, international passenger footfalls had grown more than 6% annually for six consecutive years.
The mild recovery in July was not enough to boost the cumulative figure for the fiscal year 2023-24 so far. International passenger footfalls at airports stood at 22 million in the April-July period, down 2.5%, even as domestic passenger footfalls clocked 101 million, up 11% since the same period of 2019. Another metric released by the AAI—aircraft movements, or the number of international flight journeys—still remains lower than the 2019 level, as it has been since the pandemic began.
A third metric, from the tourism ministry, gives some clues into these trends. International travel in India is being driven by the growing number of Indians travelling abroad. The number of foreign tourists entering India in the quarter ended 30 June was still 13% down since the same period four years ago, and has been slow to recover. The July data is yet to be released. (Airport footfalls is different from the number of passengers flying, as each passenger may count for multiple footfalls during the same journey. Airline-level data on the actual number of flyers points to the same disparity between Indian and foreign travellers.)
Regional trends
The northern and western regions are the only ones where airports have handled more international passengers in the April-July period than they did in that period of 2019. These regions cater to 54% of India’s international footfalls. But their improvement, too, has been tiny, and was led by Mumbai (9.5% higher), Lucknow (5.6%), Pune (4.6%), Delhi (2.9%), and Amritsar (2.1%), a Mint analysis showed.
Comparisons with the last pre-covid year of 2019 have generally been used across sectors to assess recovery trends after the pandemic. Since air travel tends to follow seasonal patterns, such comparisons have been made with the same period of 2019.
Southern airports, which alone handle over 40% of India’s international air passengers, saw international passenger footfalls in the April-July period remain 7% down since the same period in 2019. The other two regions—eastern and north-eastern—have a very small share in international traffic.
On the domestic traffic front, all regions except the east have shown sharp increases since the corresponding period in 2019. But this can partly be attributed to the start of operations at several new domestic airports under the government’s Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik (UDAN) initiative.
As many as 66 of the 101 airports that flew domestic passengers in the April-July period of both years have recorded a growth in the number.
Leaders and laggards
In the April-July period, international traffic data was available for 34 airports in the country (the rest either had no passengers or were clubbed under “Other airports” in the official data).
Out of them, 22 were big enough to allow for a fair comparison with the corresponding period of 2019. But only six of them had seen a recovery in international traffic from 2019 levels in the April-July period, a Mint analysis showed.
Two major Tier-1 airports—Delhi and Mumbai—are among those that have reported a resurgence in passenger traffic, while airports in Visakhapatnam, Varanasi, Madurai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Kolkata are lagging the most.
In terms of domestic air traffic, most major airports have successfully rebounded to their pre-pandemic levels, with only Kolkata and Chennai lagging slightly behind.
The dull data on international traffic suggests Indian aviation has more to achieve before it can claim successful recovery from the pandemic.