Demand for global flights falls after Hamas attack on Israel

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Demand for international flying has fallen in recent weeks, according to new data, with a significant hit to bookings to the Middle East in the first signs that the war between Israel and Hamas is affecting air travel.

Global flight bookings made in the three weeks after the October 7 Hamas cross-border raid on Israel were 20 per cent below 2019 levels, according to travel industry data company ForwardKeys.

The decline reverses a trend in which demand had been increasing sharply after international air travel plummeted during the pandemic. Before the attack, bookings were tracking at 15 per cent below 2019 levels, the last year before Covid-19 disrupted the industry.

Airlines have reaped bumper profits over the past six months on strong demand for travel at high ticket prices, but have faced persistent questions over whether bookings will weaken into the northern hemisphere winter.

Few airlines have reported a slowdown in demand, although several, including Ryanair, have warned their outlooks were dependent on geopolitical events.

Olivier Ponti, a senior executive at ForwardKeys, said the war had “jeopardised the strong recovery trend in demand” seen throughout the year.

“This war is bound to put people off travelling to the region, but it has also dented consumer confidence in travelling elsewhere too,” he said.

Many airlines had cut flights to Israel following the attacks and heightened fears of a broader regional war. But the flight data offers one of the first indications of how the geopolitical uncertainty appears to have affected air travel more broadly.

The data is drawn from the industry-wide ticketing database from the International Air Transport Association, and includes big national carriers in Europe, the US and Gulf. However, it does not have sales from low-cost carriers such as Ryanair or easyJet.

The hit to flights to the Middle East has been most dramatic, with bookings falling 26 percentage points from 13 per cent above 2019 levels in the weeks before the attacks, to 13 per cent below. Tickets to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt have dropped.

Bookings for outbound flights from the US have also taken a hit, with a 10 percentage point drop taking them from 6 per cent above 2019 levels to 4 per cent below.

One industry executive said the number of US tourists typically decreased during times of geopolitical strife, a pattern that has played out consistently all the way back to the Gulf war of the 1990s. 

John Strickland, an aviation industry consultant, said several other trends could have hit global flights bookings, including inflationary pressures on consumers.

Autumn is also typically a busier period for business travel, which has recovered more slowly than leisure flying.

“Airlines will need to watch trends closely on this issue but we need to bear in mind that we have now moved from an extremely buoyant summer to an as yet hard to predict winter,” he said.

József Váradi, chief executive of low-cost airline Wizz Air, on Thursday said bookings for the winter were strong.

“Of course you have issues in areas that are affected like Israel and the neighbouring countries. But other than that we see demand remaining very robust.”