Aviation analyst Sean Mendes says the continued imposition of air travel restrictions in different parts of the world will hamper the ability of Ghana’s aviation sector to fully bounce back to pre-pandemic levels.
Despite the strong performance of the domestic sector in 2021, international travel traffic is still underperforming.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recently outlined a number of stringent testing measures to convince the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government to reconsider its decision and lift its travel restrictions on travellers from Ghana to the UAE which was imposed at the end of last month.
In an interview with Citi Business News about the fortunes of the sector in 2022, Mr. Mendes was confident the domestic aviation space will continue to thrive while international travel makes slow gains.
“Even though we don’t have full compliments of relevant data, I think the domestic sector in Ghana bounced back extremely well in 2021. It looks like Ghana has exceeded passenger levels for 2019. That shows that the domestic market has rebounded completely. International travel is however at around 65% of where it was in 2019.”
“I think we’ll probably see this recovering in the second half of 2022, but 2022 will still be below the 2019 numbers. The recovery is slow and steady, and unfortunately, while Ghana has been very consistent in its protocols for entry and for travel unfortunately international travel takes two countries, so if one country has restrictions then traffic numbers will be low,” he added.