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Date Published: 11/01/2022
ARCHIVED - Spanish airports struggle to recover pre-Covid figures
Only 10 airports in Spain have recovered to 2019 commercial flight numbers
With the world poised in the hope of making 2022 a year of economic recovery, at first glance Spain appears to be doing well in the aviation stakes, as commercial air traffic recovered 83.9% of its pre-pandemic flights in December, placing the country sixth in the European Union.
However, the reality is that only 10 of the 54 Spanish airports have returned to or exceeded 2019 figures, and flight numbers are still well below those of prominent Mediterranean competitors such as Croatia (94.3% recovered in December), Greece (91.6%), Cyprus (91%) and Portugal (86.1%).
According to Eurocontrol data published by Eurostat on Monday January 10, only the airports of Córdoba, Cuatro Vientos (Madrid), Vitoria, Zaragoza, Menorca, Ibiza, La Gomera, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote and Tenerife Sur-Reina Sofía operated more trips than in December 2019.
Commercial aviation is a fundamental sector in an economy such as Spain’s, in which tourism contributed 12.4% of GDP prior to the coronavirus pandemic. In 2019, 231.5 million passengers passed through Spanish airports, of which 80% were visitors from overseas. In total, foreign tourists spent 91.912 million euros that year, the equivalent of 7.4% of that year's GDP.
The arrival of Covid dealt a severe blow to foreign spending and the collapse of international tourism at the height of the health crisis resulted in Spain being the country whose GDP took the biggest hit, plummeting 10.8% between 2019 and 2020.
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