CHANGI Airport is leading the regional travel recovery, compared with other major East Asia Pacific air hubs such as Incheon, Hong Kong and Bangkok, said Transport Minister S Iswaran in Parliament on Aug 2.

As of June, Changi is ahead of these air hubs both in terms of international traffic and city links compared to pre-Covid levels, he said.

As of the first week of July, weekly passenger traffic at Changi Airport had recovered to 55 per cent of 2019’s average weekly levels. This is on the back of weekly passenger airline services recovering to more than 50 per cent of pre-Covid levels, said Iswaran.

“Changi is also connected to 108 cities by passenger flights as of July 2022, which is more than 65 per cent of the number of cities it was connected to before the pandemic,” he said.

Iswaran was responding to Member of Parliament Louis Chua of the Workers’ Party (Sengkang GRC), who asked about passenger traffic targets, and People’s Action Party MP Shawn Huang (Jurong GRC), who requested an update on the current and projected progress of the re-opening of Changi Airport’s air routes.

“Demand for air travel remains fundamentally strong and we expect the recovery of Changi to continue and to gather pace when key markets in North-east Asia, including China, Hong Kong and Japan, fully reopen their borders,” he said.

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While it is difficult to project passenger traffic targets given that source markets are at different stages of managing the recovery from Covid-19, the focus now is to prepare the aviation ecosystem, and Changi in particular, for potential traveller capacity of 70 million passengers per year, said Iswaran.

“(This is) about the level that it was pre-Covid and is about 80 per cent or so of the capacity at Changi,” he said.