Impact Of COVID-19: Dubai International Airport Footfalls

The Dubai International Airport (DXB) is one of the busiest airports in the world and a major transit hub for passengers travelling between western countries and APAC. It is also a hub for many global retail businesses. We decided to analyze our data to quantify the impact on the aviation industry taking DXB as an example. The piece is a continuation to our COVID-19s impact on malls in Singapore series from last week.

As expected, the recent outbreak of the coronavirus around the world has had a significant impact on Dubai International Airport footfalls. CNN Business has officially reported that the global airlines are at a risk of losing $113 billion in sales (according to the International Air Transport Association).
We extracted the visitation patterns across the 3 terminals in the airport over the last 2 months.
Below is what we observed:

Footfall at the airport decreased by an average of 43%
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We analyzed the weekly average footfalls for the period Jan 11th to Jan 17th (pre-COVID-19 period) with those observed between February 29th to Mar 6th (Post COVID-19 period). Jan 11th to 17th was selected as the baseline footfall (as shown in the chart below) in order to have minimal interference from the holiday tourists near the beginning of the year.

On 29 January 2020, the UAE reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19, a Chinese national who had travelled from Wuhan to Dubai along with her family. UAE confirmed its fifth case of coronavirus within 48 hours on January 31, 2020.

Impact of COVID-19 on footfalls at Dubai International Airport (Data Visualization)

Stay tuned to our COVID-19 analysis series, as we will be looking into more impact studies on regional human movement and behavior change.