Argentina’s domestic flight traffic won’t recover until mid-2022

Argentina’s flagship carrier expects domestic operations to reach pre-pandemic levels by July of next year, according to its top executive. Aerolineas Argentinas President Pablo Ceriani said flights to tourist destinations within the country, from Patagonia in the south to Iguazu Falls in the northeast, are picking up faster than expected as the country emerges from one of the longest and harshest lockdowns in Latin America. Ceriani said he still sees room to recover on international destinations. “We are operating at roughly 20 to 30% of pre-pandemic levels in Europe and Latin America,” Ceriani said in a phone interview from Bogota, where he was attending the Alta Airlines forum. “We will have to see how passengers react to vaccine certificates.” South America’s second-largest economy adopted strict travel measures during the pandemic, halting nearly all international and domestic flights for months last year. The country removed a daily entry cap of passengers applied earlier this year and foreign tourists will be authorized to enter the country starting in November. Pablo Ceriani, CEO of Aerolineas Argentina, speaks during an interview at the company’s headquarters at Aeroparque in Buenoes Aires, Argentina, on Monday, May 18, 2020. Argentina doled out about $600m in subsidies last year to keep its state airline afloat, a practice that precedes the pandemic. Ceriani said that he expects the full-year subsidy for 2021 to be lower than the previous year’s, and declined to provide an estimate for when the carrier plans to break even. <br/>