GGRAsia – Macau delays airport extension, cites slow air traffic rebound

Macau delays airport extension, cites slow air traffic rebound

Aug 13, 2024 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck

The Macau government has put on hold a plan to create a second passenger terminal for Macau International Airport, citing “slow’ post-pandemic recovery in passenger volume.

Local legislators Ip Sio Kai and Wong Kit Cheng relayed the message from the authorities at a media briefing on Monday following a closed-doors meeting of a Legislative Assembly committee tasked with reviewing the budget-execution performance of Macau’s public finances and public spending.

Existing airport facilities were able to handle 10 million passenger journeys per year, which was “suffice” for current demand, said the legislators, in comment to local news outlets.

The projected cost of the expansion was not mentioned in media reports reviewed by GGRAsia.

In the first quarter this year, Macau’s airport handled nearly 1.8 million passenger journeys, a circa 78-percent recovery rate relative to the pre-pandemic first quarter 2019 when the airport handled about 2.3 million passenger trips, said the legislators, citing government-provided data.

The previously-mooted expansion would have created capacity for an additional 2 million passenger journeys per year. The expansion envisaged converting part of the facilities at the next-door Taipa Ferry Terminal, and the development of a heliport on the same site.

The government currently expected for full-year 2024, “10 percent to 15 percent” growth relative to 2023′s 5.15 million passenger journeys at Macau International Airport. At the top end of that growth range, it would mean an additional 772,500 journeys for this year, putting the projected 2024 tally at circa 5.92 million, or a recovery rate of circa 62 percent relative to the 9.61 million passenger journeys in 2019.

The Macau government would review the expansion topic in due course, said the legislators.

Most flights out of Macau’s air hub serve cities on the Chinese mainland. The remainder connect to destinations in East Asia and Southeast Asia.

In March and then in May, a number of Chinese places distant to Macau were added to the mainland’s Individual Visit Scheme (IVS), permitting independent travel to either Macau or Hong Kong. Few of those newly-added places are currently served by direct air links to Macau.

On August 20, China Eastern Airlines will start running two weekly flights to one of the places – Xi’an, in China’s north-central Shaanxi province – according to the latest approved flight list from Macau’s Civil Aviation Authority.

Xi’an and Qingdao – the latter in eastern Shandong province – were added to the IVS list with effect from March 6. Currently, Air Macau is the only airline with scheduled services between Macau and Qingdao, with four weekly flights, according to Macau airport’s timetable.