Airports Council International (ACI) is the global trade representative of airport authorities around the world. Credit: Simon_sees.

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Airports Council International (ACI) World has released its economic analysis, which states that the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic can decrease the passenger traffic by around two-fifths and airport revenue by half this year.

According to the previous forecast by ACI World, the passenger traffic is expected to decrease by 38.1%, which equals 3.6 billion passengers.

This reduction in passenger traffic and flight cancellations will lead to reduced revenues for airports.

The airport industry was slated to generate around $172bn in revenue, due to Covid-19, the industry could see a loss of 45%, which exceeds $76bn by the end of this year.

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ACI World Director General Angela Gittens said: “The global airport industry has faced multi-billion-dollar losses already in the first quarter of 2020, but it is now predicted that the impact of Covid-19 will extend not only to the second quarter of 2020 but also the second half of the year.

“Most experts in the air transport industry agree that recovery may take a year to 18 months to reach pre-crisis traffic levels and the industry may not record pre-Covid-19 traffic volumes again before the end of 2021.

“A fair and equitable global economic policy response is required to safeguard essential airport operations, to protect millions of jobs worldwide, and to ensure the survival of the industry and lay the foundation for a fair recovery.”

Airports have implemented different measures to safeguard their financial stability amid decreasing revenues.

Airports are reported to have high fixed and unavoidable costs and have started decreasing the variable costs by postponing capital expenditure, closing some parts of the infrastructure and addressing staffing costs.

According to ACI, it is expected that there will be a faster domestic passenger traffic recovery.

However, international passenger traffic is expected to take more time to recover as international flights require reciprocal permissions.

It added that different states will recover at different paces to ease the travel restrictions imposed by different countries.

Earlier this week, ACI World released its guidelines for the IT practices to be executed at airports amid the disruption caused by the pandemic.