Forecast of Air Travel to the Southeast US
Highlights
2020 estimate of air travelers to the South East TTRA region (SETTRA):
43.2M (↓-47.7% YOY)
2021 estimate of air travelers to the South East TTRA region (SETTRA):
49.2M (↑+13.8% YOY)
Thoughts on this Forecasting Enterprise
Approaching the one year mark of the first reported occurrence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, the world anticipates the time when “travel as normal” returns. It was difficult to predict the level of impact that coronavirus would take on the travel industry – early prognostications were laughably wrong. The reason for such egregious forecasting errors was primarily the fact that forecasts taking place within the first couple months of COVID-19 disruption were heavily judgement-based, as opposed to time series based. For the non-statistician reader, I mean to say that we simply didn’t have enough data from within COVID-19 times in order to accurately extrapolate the travel landscape 3 months to 1 year out. Not only did we not have enough data, we also didn’t know that COVID-19 would still be a major impediment to airline travel 3 months to 1 year out! (I use the inclusive “we” to refer to experts within the travel industry, econometricians, and public statisticians, but not everyone underestimated the effect of COVID-19. My old man, for one, took all of his money out of the stock market and proclaimed doom on all travel-related industries before I’d even heard of the virus – good on you, dad!). Times have changed. Nine months of data on travel patterns during the global COVID-19 pandemic is sufficient to have resolved many of the kinks in forecasting near term travel patterns.
Now that I’ve made my case that forecasting air travel is more accurate than ever before – during COVID-19 times – let me highlight our disclaimer: forecasts are just highly educated guesses. The guesses take into account seasonality (very important), early nonseasonal trends of airline recovery (important), and an assumption (crucial) that those nonseasonal recovery trends continue over the next 1 year. The Holt-Winters’ seasonal method is the time series method of choice for this forecast.
Forecast
Discussion
What does this mean for your destination? Don’t assume that everything will go back to normal, even when the COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available. The return to pre-COVID-19 level of air travel will not be rapid. Caution is in the air and will take awhile to clear. Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly provides a good synopsis on the likely short to mid-term trajectory of the airline industry in this discussion with Skift. Kelly expects business travel to take longer than 5 years to recover (if ever) and submits a “wild guess” of 2024 for the return of the airline industry to 2019 levels – with most of the recovery occurring post-2021. As any forecaster will tell you, the margin of error expands precipitously the further out you forecast.
The South East TTRA Region (SETTRA) includes Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. We see no overarching trend in primary origin markets for the SETTRA region. Unless you have solid insights telling you otherwise, assume that domestic arrivals will come from similar geographies as before.
Want more air travel insights for your destination? Dean Runyan Associates provides tabular and graphical summaries of domestic air travel to airports, metro areas and states. Available both quarterly and annually, state level analysis is free to the public at AIr — Dean Runyan Associates while more granular data are available through custom reporting.
