Latin American air transport is doing wonderfully well. The Association of Latin American and Caribbean Airlines (ALTA) has reported that last year passenger traffic grew by 7.1%, or 126.44 million passengers, excluding Brazilian domestic routes. On Intra-Latin American routes, this growth even reached 7.4%, for an average load factor up two points to 81.7%.<\/p>\n
Internationally, 20.12 million passengers flew on ALTA member routes in 2016, representing growth of 5.3%. The Europe-Latin America route was the most dynamic, recording growth of 14.1% and 3.28 million passengers. However, the largest volume of international traffic remains with North America, which saw growth of 3.6% last year. With 16.33 million passengers, intra-Americas traffic represents 81% of the total international passenger flow. ALTA airlines offered 43.8 million seats on intra-Latin American routes and 23.8 million seats on routes to the rest of the world, while 26 new international routes were inaugurated last year.<\/p>\n
With the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, one might have thought that traffic would slow down, given the sometimes bellicose rhetoric of the new American administration towards its Latin American neighbours, particularly Mexico. On the contrary, growth continues to be strong (still excluding domestic traffic in Brazil, which is in the midst of a recession). In the first three months of 2017, the number of passengers carried by ALTA airlines reached 39.14 million, up 8.1% compared with the same period in 2016. International routes from Latin America and the Caribbean even saw their traffic increase by 9.1% to 5.6 million passengers.<\/p>\n
Passenger traffic to North America did better than in 2016. It rose by 7% between January and March (4.55 million passengers), while the Europe-Latin America\/Caribbean route continued to soar, with a jump of 19.8% or just over 900,000 passengers. Ten new international routes were launched during the same period.<\/p>\n
Mexico alone should see the number of seats on international routes increase by one million. At the start of the year, analysis firm ForwardKeys reported that online bookings for Mexico had grown by 6.1% in the first quarter of 2017, and that the state of bookings over the following quarters indicated an increase of almost 20%. The increase in the number of air routes with the United States partly explains this. New routes include Alaska Airlines with the opening of routes from Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego to Mexico City, the opening in November of routes from Nashville and St Louis to Cancun by Southwest, new frequencies from Aeromexico to Boston and from Guadalajara to San Jose.<\/p>\n
But this growth also concerns services between Mexico and Europe. Air France will be offering a daily Airbus A380 flight to Mexico City this winter, instead of three weekly frequencies this summer. Alitalia had also indicated a few months ago that it would move to a daily frequency from Rome, but the carrier's bankruptcy could change its development plans. Iberia, for its part, will be offering 17 weekly frequencies from Madrid to Mexico City between June and September.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whatever the threats or retaliatory measures against Latin America by Donald Trump's US government, air transport in this part of the world is booming. <\/p>","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":61519,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[1145,131,1105],"type-darticle":[],"n_magazine":[],"class_list":["post-61515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aerien","tag-amerique-du-sud","tag-compagnies-aeriennes","tag-amerique-du-nord-centrale","vapo-free"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n