FLYING HIGH
By admin • Jun 1st, 2010The airline industry has had a difficult couple of years, from the financial crisis and
H1N1 fears to an Icelandic volcano. But Middle Eastern carriers remain bullish.
How do you find Davos compared to last year? The banks have returned. There are more NGOs than last year. And people obviously focused on the recession, the timing of the recovery. They focused on the risk of the bubble bursting, some economies going into recession in the back of the year, a double dip. Now we are talking about a global view. I’m here as the chair of the travel and tourism group which is made up of airlines, hoteliers, of a cruise company, of distribution organizations. We focus on three areas. The environment impacts hotels, it impacts cruising, and airlines. It has risk of putting the airline industry and other service industries into a very complex environment in regard to charging if there is a global approach.
The second area is security, security again just in airports, just in airlines, any place where there is a body of people. So again, whether it’s hotels, whether it’s events, whether it’s sporting arenas. And with the recent incident on Christmas Day, I’m concerned that people are looking at a different way to breach security. We have developing countries that need to invest not only in infrastructure and security assistance, but also to train people.
The third area is competitiveness. Looking again as the industry recovers, we still get hit by taxes, we work by lateral processes. Aviation and logistics can tie up. So those areas are where we touched on and we come out of Davos and the WEF to look to report on these areas.
The airlines industry passed through huge trouble last year. Is that easing?
Talking about 2009? That was an extraordinary year. Because not only did we have the global financial crisis, we had the pandemic. I think sometimes people forget that stopped people from travelling. Corporate travelers where companies cut back on travelling expenditures. Then we had the leisure travelers concerned about the pandemic as well. Most people stayed at home.
When you look at the statistics for 2009, the only area that was strong was, in fact, the Middle East. Passenger growth was 10 percent over the previous year when all of the other regions in the world were negative. So last we saw good traffic numbers.
