Dubai Airshow 2021: DXB will see over 57m passengers in 2022, says Paul Griffiths

Gulf News

Dubai International (DXB) has raised its 2022 passenger forecasts from the current 57 million as governments worldwide lift COVID-19 travel restrictions, according to Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths.  Read the full story here: https://gulfnews.com/1.83707282  See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km

Transcript

00:00Well I think what's happened around the world is governments have got more decisive and

00:05informed about how to manage the virus and everyone is now understanding what they need

00:11to do and that clearly is to keep social distance from others, to wear masks, to get vaccinated

00:21wherever possible and vaccination rates I think globally have been rising all the time

00:27and the UAE, the UK, a lot of our major markets now have a predominance of vaccinated travellers

00:35and the combination of all of those things I think has given people the confidence to

00:40start to plan their travel again and what we're now seeing is those major markets come

00:45alive, Northern Europe of course, the weather's starting to get a bit cool so people are flocking

00:51to Dubai in greater numbers than ever before and of course we've got the airshow, the expo,

00:57the 50th anniversary of the founding of the UAE so great reasons to be here and those

01:03are all coming through in the numbers that we're seeing, the 20.7 million that we saw

01:09cumulative to the end of October.

01:11Well we've raised our forecast for the end of the year by two million and we believe

01:16that the growth for 2022 will be stronger.

01:19We originally thought 57 million but we're in the process of revising that and original

01:26forecast was that we'd be back to pre-pandemic levels by 2025.

01:32I think we'll quite confidently assume that we'll get back there rather quicker than we

01:36originally thought, end of 2024 is where I think people are really thinking it's going

01:42to be now.

01:43So let's hope that's right but I think the thing is unfortunately all the forecasting

01:48methodologies are rather difficult at the moment because Covid's reset all of those

01:53so I'm hoping that we'll get back sooner but I think we have to be a little bit cautious

01:59in our optimism to see whether the current trend is maintained.

02:03Obviously we are still the number one airport in the world for international travel and

02:08obviously the rate at which our major markets open up will determine the speed of our recovery

02:14and as you say Europe's long been open because they've been quite advanced with the vaccine

02:20and their measures to control the spread, Russia's been open, Africa's now starting

02:25to open up, the US of course opening up to Europe that's been a major milestone and we're

02:32starting to see crucial travel flows like India, US start to come back.

02:37The shadow on the planet at the moment remains Asia and Australasia, Australia and New Zealand

02:43where clearly their original strategy of locking down and trying to avoid the virus hasn't

02:49really worked.

02:51They now need to catch up with their vaccine programme and Asia needs to get control of

02:55the pandemic as well so those are the major markets that we are really dependent on to

03:00see a full recovery of our entire traffic.

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