Government delays in sanctioning Covid tests for travellers risks wholesale airline failures, but the delay is “not surprising”, Iata director general Alexandre de Juniac has said.
The Iata chief said: “Governments are not governed by transport ministers. They are governed by health. They are fighting a pandemic.
“Despite a strong push from the travel and tourism industry, it is not surprising there is still caution from the authorities.”
Iata is seeking a global regime of pre-departure testing and de Juniac insisted: “We try to demonstrate what we are proposing is safe and has good results from a health point of view.”
He said: “We are in discussions with several governments and experimenting with testing, working with governments and with members.
“We have a working group with the World Health Organisation to consolidate data from experiments to demonstrate that it is manageable.
“We are working with ICAO [the international Civil Aviation Organisation] to establish a set of measures.
“Things are moving in the right direction. We hope to have something applicable and recognised in the coming weeks that could be deployed for the winter season.”
He added: “ICAO is moving in the right direction, but not as fast as we would like. There are still discussions and contradictions to be solved.
“We would like the right recommendations followed by a lot of governments, but that could take more time.”
Iata chief economist Brian Pearce said: “A vaccine would be transformational, but an effective testing regime would make a big difference.”
He noted: “We’ve seen 30-40 airlines fail or restructure under bankruptcy. We’ve not seen lots of airline failures because governments have stepped in.
“But during the winter we would expect that to happen unless we get further government support.”
Pearce argued: “Aid in excess of $162 billion has kept airlines on life support. But as the industry started to fly again, the challenge has changed to making flying economically viable.”
He said: “There are some green shoots. Domestic markets show there is a desire to travel. [But] we downgraded our expectations for 2021.
“We continue to base our forecasts on a vaccine becoming available in 2021, but we expect air travel to still be about 50% down on 2019.”
He explained: “We now have a better idea of the challenges of producing and distributing a vaccine and of getting everyone vaccinated. So we’re not as positive about the second half of next year.”
Pearce also noted Covid case numbers are affecting demand, not just travel restrictions.
He said: “Air travel is particularly sensitive to the Covid case numbers. International travel is affected by government travel restrictions, but we’re also seeing Covid cases affect domestic travel.
“We had markets in South Korea and Vietnam in recovery by July, but then second waves knocked them back down. So traffic is very sensitive to Covid cases.”