Air transport is a value chain where passengers become one additional rather than the essential element. Large airports are moving toward a business more commercially driven, with more creative and technological features and amenities.
Globally, overall capacity is down nearly 50 million seats or 47%. According to the Official Aviation Guide, OAG (2020a) coronavirus has devastated the aviation and travel market, causing consistent and severe capacity cuts week after week. Thus, by 2019, LCCs had captured 37.3% of the capacity share, providing 534 million seats out of 1.43 billion in total for all the airlines ( Figure 1). Following Jimenez and Suau-Sanchez (2020), between 20 European air travel supply doubled, yet the low-cost market grew 14 times its size at the turn of the millennium. Since the consolidation of low-cost carriers (LCCs) in 2001, the long-term effects of LCCs presence at European airports, have been extraordinary for airports and local economies of the regions. Therefore, the aviation industry requires forecasts to anticipate future scenarios (Rodriguez et al., 2020). As airport infrastructure projects are expensive and involve many resources, an understanding based on data from future demand provides airport planners with the necessary information for effective decision-making in the short, medium and long term. Evidently, air traffic forecasts are essential in airport planning for determining future capacity requirements. In a competitive environment, airports require expanding and enhancing their appeal to increase their share of air travel and tourism (ACI, 2017). Airports are vital economic generators providing a gateway to their city, state, region, country. Airports are required to be more attractive to airlines and passengers with relevant investment in commercial policies. The pandemic has changed the landscape of the aviation industry and tourism (Albers and Rundshagen, 2020). Airports will face unpleasant issues caused by the pandemic such as fewer passengers, costly health regulations and airlines and tenants that do not pay their bills on time. According to Serrano and Kazda (2020), suggest that the uncertainty brought by COVID-19 on air transport, the organizations need to ensure that sustainable and safe airport operations can be maintained. To tackle the outbreak and contain the spread, the Spanish authorities undertook exceptional measures based on a generalized lockdown by which the majority of the economic activity ceased for several weeks. After Italy, the spread of the virus was quick and Spain became the second epicenter in Europe by number of cases and deceased (Henríquez et al., 2020). For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented crisis in Spain. Maneenop and Kotcharin (2020) investigated the pandemic impact on the global airline business, and they suggested that if governments believe in market mechanisms and let the airline firms file for bankruptcy, the consequences will be the interruption of the global supply chain and related businesses. This research contributes to prior literature on catastrophes, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 in the aviation industry. The tourism industry is one of the most important global employers (1 in 10 jobs are directly related to tourism, UNWTO, 2020a) and the major gross domestic product (GDP) contributor for several countries, tourism and COVID-19 are the epicenter of all international discussions and economies (Sigala, 2020). COVID-19 tourism impacts will be uneven in space and time. This implies that on many occasions they are obtaining considerable losses. As a consequence, international and domestic travel have all but ceased, hospitality and leisure, travel agencies and wholesalers or even public transport and restaurants are consciously working to reduce pandemic effects to the minimum. The COVID-19 pandemic is causing an unprecedented crisis for the world’s airlines. Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited
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