The corona pandemic shook up the travel industry and with it air traffic. The number of passengers and flight movements collapsed significantly and brought about a loss for two years in a row at Zurich Airport.

Scheduled and charter traffic is now slowly recovering from this shock: in the first quarter of 2022, Swiss airports recorded a total of 7 million arriving and departing passengers. This is the result of the figures published by the Federal Statistical Office (BFS) on Tuesday.

Even though five times as many passengers traveled via Swiss airports in scheduled and charter traffic in the first quarter of 2022 as in the first three months of the year, that is only half compared to 2019, the last year before the corona crisis.

Scheduled services quickly collapsed completely and are only slowly recovering

If you look at the development in scheduled traffic since 2000, you can clearly see the slump caused by the corona pandemic and how far the number of air passengers is from the pre-pandemic times.

The slumps become clear if you compare the individual months from 2020 with the corresponding months from the pre-Corona period. These differences can be seen in the graphic below.

If you select the view of individual airports in the graphic above, you will see that Zurich Airport seems to be having a harder time catching up in the pre-pandemic times. Across Switzerland, the number of passengers in a month has never been so close to the corresponding month before the pandemic: 38.6 percent were missing in March 2022 to March 2019. However, over 45 percent of the passengers are missing at Zurich Airport in the same month.

It’s different at Geneva Airport: Here the difference compared to the time before the pandemic fell below 30 percent for the first time. As a result, the absolute passenger numbers at Geneva Airport in February and March are as close to those at Zurich Airport as was unthinkable before the pandemic. In February 2022, there were just 3 percent more passengers via Zurich than via Geneva. Before the pandemic, it was around 40 percent more in the same month.

This different recovery can be impressively demonstrated by another fact: Geneva Airport has already reached the level of November 2019 again. Zurich, on the other hand, is moving at a level that the airport actually left behind 16 years ago.

At Zurich Airport, the reason for the somewhat lagging recovery is long-haul business. Media spokeswoman Bettina Kunz says that Zurich Airport has many more long-haul connections compared to Basel and Geneva:

“Since the recovery on long-haul routes is slower than on European routes, this effect weighs more heavily in Zurich.”

Restrictive corona measures would still apply in large parts of Asia, which is why flight connections are severely restricted, especially in this region of the world. «China, including Hong Kong, is still missing completely. This also has an impact on the hub offering in Zurich.”

The figures confirm this: 82 percent of passengers flew from Swiss airports to a destination in Europe in the first quarter, only 7 percent stayed in Asia and only 5 percent in the direction of North America.

More take-offs and landings and more air freight

The number of flight movements was also able to increase significantly again: around 66,600 take-offs and landings were registered in the first quarter. According to the BFS, this is three times as many as in the same period of the previous year. Air freight rose by 28 percent to around 88,800 tons.

The recovery is expected to continue in the current year: Zurich Airport expects around 20 million passengers to travel via Zurich again this year.