French airports and Covid-19. Have all airports been hit in the same way?

Keywords: French Airports, Covid-19, Air travel demand
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 24

Abstract

The air transport sector has been one of the hardest-hit industries by the CoV2 pandemic. In France, the air passenger traffic has been reduced by almost 70% between 2019 and 2020. While the effects of the pandemic hit all airline services, our contribution raises the question of whether the magnitude of these impacts has been uniform across all commercial airports in the country. To capture these effects, our analysis first looks at trends in monthly air travel demand from january 2019 to january 2021, by airport. Our data comes from the French administration of civil aviation and provides information on the type of carriers (full service carriers vs low cost carriers), on the type of origin/destination (domestic vs European Union vs Rest of the World) and on the type of airport (Hub vs non hub). Our sample includes the 54 largest airports. The study focus on the decline in commercial air passenger traffic at the individual airport level. The aim of the paper is then to identify the most significant factors in understanding the differences between airports