Airline and hotel news worldwide

AIR TRAVEL DEMAND will not recover until at least 2022, but possibly as late as 2024, according Emirates President Sir

Tim Clark. A global vaccination process combined with social distancing measures will be crucial to industry recovery, he told aviation industry consultant John Strickland during the ATM Virtual conference. ( June 1-3),

“Eventually we’ll get over this; it’s probably just the next six to nine months where it’s going to be tough. I believe once we’ve got everybody through the inoculation process, like we did with polio, with smallpox and everything else, we will start to see things coming back to normal. And that way, by the summer of next year, we will start to see an uptick, quite a large uptick, in demand for travel, both on the short-haul and for airlines like ourselves.”

Emirates will also continue to restructure its fleet, with some aircraft orders deferred or even cancelled, he revealed.

“We know the A380 is over, the B747 is over, but the A350 and the B787 will always have a place. They may not be ordered soon, they may have orders deferred and pushed back, but eventually they will come back, and they will be a better fit probably for global demand in the years post the pandemic,” Clark added.