World Routes: Emerging markets key to traffic recovery

The one-to-one meetings and Global Strategy Summit (GSS) at World Routes in Beijing got underway at 9am sharp this morning. While global aviation leaders have been busy discussing thefuture shape of the air transport industry, executives from the world's airlines, airports and tourism authorities have been hard at work mapping out airline networks.

Speaking this morning at the GSS, Jamal Saghir, director for energy, transport and water at The World Bank, stressed the important role emerging economies would play in the recovery of air traffic. He forecast a return to air traffic growth in 2010 and said the most significant recovery would be seen in the Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American markets.

Saghir went on to highlight what he sees as the major challenges to traffic recovery, which include the effect of the credit crunch on airlines' abilities to refinance their fleets, oil price volatility and climate change.

Speaking on a panel discussion following Saghir's address was Angela Gittens, ACI director general, who spoke on the dilemma facing airports during the recession with their high fixed costs and long-term construction committments. During the same interactive panel discussion, Airbus's manager for market research and forecasts, Arnaud Meheu highlighted the relative resiliance of major hubs during the economic downturn. He illustrated this with the example of traffic between Hong Kong and Europe between April 2008 and the same month in 2009. Connecting traffic on this routing saw 2.2% growth, but point-to-point traffic declined by 7.7%. "The hub and spoke system is resiliant and we believe there will be a trend to larger aircraft in the future," said Meheu.

Lucy Siebert, Routes News