India’s aviation recovery dragged down by dull international travel

livemint.com:

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.) 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.