China’s Missing Market

IATA, in a press release last week, made it perfectly clear that the Covid era is over. “In February 2024,” it stated, “the airline industry achieved full recovery in total passenger traffic, surpassing the 2019 threshold by 5.7%.” There’s one major market, however, still just a fraction of its pre-pandemic size: International flying into and out of China, which remains deeply depressed relative to where it was five years ago.