The Slow Recovery of Airline Travel in Canada During COVID-19 - Part 1
Canada’s airlines are desperately trying to get Canada to loosen their international travel restrictions for at least the last 3 months, but they have been hesitant to show how bad it really is out there. After Lucky at OMAAT announced that American TSA had screened over 1 million passengers for the first time since the beginning of March, I wanted to see how that compared to Canadian statistics. After finding comparable statistics, I can see why Canadian airlines continue to lobby the government for changes to their quarantine system.
Airports are historically empty
For context, from Lucky at One Mile at a Time
On Sunday, October 18, 2020, the TSA screened 1,031,505 travelers, representing the first time the country has passed one million daily air travelers in many months. On the same day of the week last year the TSA screened 2,606,266 travelers, so this still represents a ~61% decrease in traffic. The last day where we saw more daily travelers was March 16, 2020, when 1,257,823 people were screened.
The raw data that Lucky posted is from the TSA website (TSA Screened Passenger Data) and it measures the amount of passengers that depart from US airports each day (and therefore go through security). After a quick search, I found that Canada’s version of the TSA, CATSA, posts similar data for the top 15 busiest airports in the country. The airports included in the data include the following airports:
Calgary International Airport
Winnipeg International Airport
Toronto Pearson International Airport
Ottawa International Airport
Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau
Halifax Stanfield International Airport
Kelowna International Airport
Québec City Jean Lesage International Airport
Regina Airport Authority
Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport
Saskatoon John G. Diefenbaker International Airport
Victoria International Airport
St. John’s International Airport
I’ve taken a screenshot of the most recent data below, but my GoogleSheet with the raw data is here.
Safe to say, this list includes all airports with over 1M enplanements a year and approximately 95% of the Canadian commercial passengers. Some interesting data in this list:
The Canadian market is about 1/14th the size of the US Aviation market. There is limited domestic competition in Canada, which drives domestic prices up and limits access to travel
Canadian passenger traffic dropped quickly, just like the US, but it hasn’t ramped up nearly as quickly
Based on this data, Canada has only passed 20% of the normal passenger volume (80% decline) twice since the end of March, on September 4th, the Friday before Labour Day and August 18th, a Saturday in August
Looking at the baseline data from last year, it looks like they only had 70K passengers screened on that Saturday the previous year, it’s more than likely there is missing data. Does anyone know the answer to why this data is so out of place?
For comparison, the USA has 121 days that have had passenger numbers have declined less than 80%, 50 days have declined less than 70%, and 4 days have declined less than 60%
There were 24 days when less than 5,000 people embarked a plane in Canada
April 12th was the low point for Aviation in Canada, with only 3,237 people going through CATSA checkpoints, representing a 98.08% decline compared to the previous year
Airline screenings didn’t go above 10,000 in Canada for 75 days between March 28th and June 12th
Passenger data isn’t broken down by domestic, transborder and international, but Toronto Pearson (YYZ) released that data for August. Domestic travel was down only 78.3%, International travel was down 91.9% and transborder travel was down an incredible 95.2%. July data from Toronto Pearson was marginally worse showing the continued recovery of the market. Vancouver Airport (YVR) reports similar numbers, although their transborder travel was down 99%.
Overall passenger traffic was down 87.4 percent in August at Pearson Airport (YYZ)
I created a graph to compare the recovery of travel between the two countries and it’s clear that Canada is recovering more cautiously, especially during long weekends (July 4th and Labour Day in the US have large spikes compared to similar days in Canada). The graph plots the difference in screened travellers for each country along with a seven-day moving average.
I’ve also removed the first 18 days of March and added 100K passengers to the data for August 18th as I suspect that number was missing a significant amount of data.
Now, the lack of overall direction related to COVID-19 in the United States more than likely contributes to their quick recovery. In comparison, Canada has banned most international visitors and mandated a 14-day quarantine on arrival into Canada that has been in effect for many months now. That quarantine in place personally kept me from leaving the country when cases were low in Canada.
The Point
It’s clear that the decisions that the government made have hindered the overall tourism market in Canada. I don’t believe we should open up our borders to the masses, nor do I believe we should completely remove our quarantine, I do believe the policies can be adapted to our continually improving knowledge. While our knowledge on COVID-19 has evolved over the last few months as we continue to learn effective ways to stop the spread, it may be time to consider alternative, innovative ways in order to boost tourism providers as we head into 2021.
