TOURISM, THE ANSWER TO REBUILDING AFRICA'S AVIATION INDUSTRY?

As global air travel positions to outperform 2019 levels, there is a surge in initiatives across Africa’s aviation industry to improve domestic and international air connectivity and increase air traffic within Africa and between Africa and neighbouring regions.

The trends emerging in pursuit of this focus, while being implemented on a state-by-state basis, reveal a strong correlation between Africa's air travel recovery and growth and tourism in and out of the continent.

These trends can be classified under three main areas:

African states respond to international tourism demand with initiatives to improve tourism channels.

Increasing Foreign-Direct Investments (FDI) and Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in Africa's aviation sector.

African airlines restructure to adopt operating models better suited to their regions traffic.

The airspaces of African countries have mostly been modelled with little consideration to neighbouring regions and their traffic patterns. The outcome has been a fragmented airspace with policies that limit the free movement of air travel passengers from country to country. Despite these limitations, tourism has, for a significant part of three decades, played a key role in driving air traffic to, from and within Africa.

According to the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), tourism is a social, cultural and economic phenomenon that involves people traveling to countries or places outside of their usual environment for personal or business reasons. These people are known as visitors (tourists or excursionists; residents or non-residents) and tourism refers to their activities, some of which involve tourism expenditure. In 2021, a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report estimated that losses to Africa’s tourism sectors because of the pandemic were between US$170 billion and US$253 billion. Projections further revealed that travel to Africa would return to pre-pandemic levels between 2023 and 2024.