2022 and 2023 in air travel with Luis Felipe de Oliveira, ACI World

At the ACI WAGA in Marrakech, International Airport Review Editor Holly Miles caught up with Luis Felipe de Oliveira, Director General of ACI World.

Together they discussed the recovery of ACI World’s member airports around the world, the summer of discontent in Europe over the summer of 2022, how a passenger-centric approach is the strategy airports need to take for the future, sustainability and how they can help convince governments around the world to support the development of sustainable aviation fuels, as well as the ongoing war in Ukraine and how it is affecting aviation markets around the world.

Key takeaways from the interview: 

• ACI World believes domestic traffic will recover by the end of 2023 – faster than international markets.
• China has not yet reopened its markets which has a big impact on the rest of the world.
• The airport is an ecosystem that needs to work harmoniously, and when one part of this puzzle goes wrong then it affects the whole ecosystem like a domino effect.
• Aviation is an integrator says Felipe, a capillary of the regions in which they sit.
• ACI World believes we can double the size of the industry to 2040 with 18 billion passengers travelling by that year but preparations and investments must be made
• We may double the size of air travellers, but we do not need to double the size of the employees – technology must play a crucial role in the sustainable growth of the air travel industry. However, we must also keep the human touch in certain areas of the airport says de Oliveria.
• We have around 1.5 billion air travellers with an accessibility issue of some kind. 
• It is the lack of harmonisation in the industry that is causing the sector to recover much slower than expected.
• The airport industry is a very capital-intensive industry so they need to find a way to finance airports, we are coming out of the pandemic with huge debt. We need to see how we can translate that into better use of our infrastructure and into less investments or into more sustainable investments that build on something for the future and how they can adapt that in the reality of airport charges.
• The reality is that an air ticket purchased by a passengers, less than 5% of the ticket actually goes to an airport. The industry needs to be able to communicate this to passengers.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!