GGRAsia – Macau 2022 flight traffic likely 30pct of 2019: airport boss

Macau 2022 flight traffic likely 30pct of 2019: airport boss

Feb 25, 2022 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck

Macau International Airport might this year see the volume of passengers recover to approximately “30 percent” of pre-Covid 19 levels.

The figure was mentioned by Ma Iao Hang, chairman of Macau International Airport Co Ltd – a body also known as CAM – in comments to the local press at a corporate lunch on Thursday. Macau’s airport handled 9.61 million passengers in 2019, the year immediately before the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the airport operator’s data, the passenger volume fell to 1.17 million in 2020, and to nearly 1.15 million in 2021 amid travel restrictions linked to Covid-19 countermeasures.

As of the end of 2021, Macau had seen “stabilised” flight services with ten destinations in mainland China. They were: Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Ningbo, Tianjin, Chongqing, Wenzhou, Nanning and Nanjing, Mr Ma mentioned at the Thursday event.

Mr Ma also noted that a building extension – on the south side of the airport terminal – would be ready for commission this year. Once in use, the extension would allow the airport to handle in aggregate 10 million passenger movements annually.

To date, mainland China remains the only place to have a largely quarantine-free travel arrangement with Macau.

For full-year 2021, Macau saw 501,387 visitor arrivals by air, a figure 14.9 percent higher than 2020, according to a separate set of data released by the city’s Statistics and Census Service.

The 2021 tally of visitor arrivals by air was nevertheless only 13 percent of that in 2019, when the total stood at 3.84 million, the census service data indicated.