Beirut-Rafik Hariri International Airport, like other airports around the world, experienced a significant decrease in passengers in 2020 largely due to the Covid19 pandemic.
The number of Beirut’s International airport passengers fell down in 2020 by 70.71%, as it recorded 2.44 million (M) compared to 8.69 M passengers in 2019. Total arrivals alone dropped by an annual 72.62% to reach 1.17 M in year 2020. By the same token, Departures slumped by 70.26% year-on-years to reach 1.28M passengers for the same period. Further, the number of transit passenger’s decreased by a yearly 1.69% to 87,651 passengers by end of December 2020.
Overall, the current political and economic crisis adding to the Coronavirus spread has driven the country onto an unprecedented situation like no other. According to “Macrotrends”, Lebanese youth’s emigration rate is now among all time high and it has increased by 47.19% compared to last year.
Moreover, the youth’s desire to emigrate at any cost will likely surging the number of total departures in the upcoming months as it has doubled during the last four months. In fact, the average number of departures has increased from 584,127 to 1,052,491 after Beirut Port explosion. In addition, the number of tourists is not expected to improve as the world is still at the core of the pandemic.
In turn, data on occupancy as per E&Y benchmark survey revealed that the occupancy rate at Beirut’s 4- and 5- star hotels fell to a low of 16% by November 2020. As for the average room rate it went up by 156% from $84 in November 2019 to $215 in November 2020. However, the increase is inflated by valuing the room rates at the official exchange rate of 1,500 LBP per USD.
Yearly Beirut’s Airport Activity
Source: Beirut Airport, BLOMINVEST