Madeira airport is the main gateway responsible for the entry of passengers into the Autonomous Region of Madeira (ARM). Is tourism in ARM heavily dependent on Air Transport? The specific objective is to establish, through Pearson's correlation analysis, the observed behavior of some indicators (in 2919 and 2020) on tourist activity and its relationship with air traffic. Several tourist indicators and their influence on tourism were studied, as well as the evidence that air transport is central to the tourist development of Madeira Island. The information collected and the correlations results shows a crucial importance of air transportation for the tourism activity in ARM. The existence of flights to the island means more capacity to generate traffic, more tourists, more occupation of hotels and greater economic development.
TopIntroduction
The Autonomous Region of Madeira (ARM) is an archipelago of volcanic origin, located in the North Atlantic, in a region known as Macaronesia, about 450 kilometres north of the Canary Islands and 500 kilometres west of Morocco and about 1,000 kilometres from Mainland Portugal (Lisbon). The region includes two islands, Madeira, and Porto Santo, and two uninhabited groups, the Desertas and the Selvagens. Funchal, the regional capital, is located on Madeira Island (Visit Portugal, no date). The ARM is made up of 11 municipalities and 54 parishes (10 municipalities and 53 parishes are located on the island of Madeira and the rest on the island of Porto Santo) (Madeira.best, 2021).
The resident population is 254.157 inhabitants in Madeira, representing 2.5% of the country's resident population. In terms of tourist accommodation Madeira has 1,194 units, a share of 20.5% of the total accommodation in the country. Regarding the number of guests, Madeira recorded 1,617,208 guests in 2019, (a weight of 6.8% from a total of 23,953,765 in mainland Portugal) (FFMS, 2019).
Madeira’s Cristiano Ronaldo Airport, also known as Funchal or Santa Cruz Airport, opened on July 18th, 1964. It is one of the most important in Portugal and serves the island of Madeira but also operates domestic and international destinations, mainly within Europe. TAP Air Portugal is the airline that most serves Madeira airport with seven daily flights from Lisbon and two daily flights from Porto (Aeroportodamadeira.pt, 2022).
According to ANA – Aeroportos de Portugal, airport authority that manages all main airports in Mainland Portugal, Madeira and Azores, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, brought drastic reductions in the number of passengers in Madeira airport with a drop of 65.2% against Lisbon with a decrease of 70.3%. In the same period, the movement of aircraft at Madeira airport saw its capacity reduced by 52.3% and Lisbon by 60.1%. In the network of all ANA airports the number of passengers decreased by 69.6% and the number of movements in relation to 2019 fell by 57.5% (ANA, 2021, p. 12).
The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously affected the aviation industry, with air traffic falling by more than two thirds compared to 2019 levels. The prolonged drop in air traffic will undoubtedly have consequences for the years to come, threatening economic viability countries and companies, employment and working conditions (Delli, 2021). The number of air passengers carried dropped -60.2% in 2020 to 1,808 million (4,543million in 2019), with global revenue down -54.4%. Losses reached record values in 2020 (-137.7 billion of USD), after net profits in 2019 in the order of 26.4 billion. Regarding tourism, the behaviour was identical, with a -72.3% drop in international tourist arrivals (405 million in 2020 versus 1,466 in 2019), with revenues dropping by -63.2% in the same period (IATA, 2022; UNWTO, 2022).
Despite tourism having had a negative impact on a global level, Madeira Region was no exception. So the main question of investigation is to understand: Is tourism in ARM also heavily dependent on air transportation?
The general objective is to evaluate the effects that the reduction in traffic had on Madeira’s tourism during the year of 2020. The specific objective is to establish, using Pearson's correlation analysis, the observed behaviour (2019/2020) of the following indicators of tourist activity in ARM: a) Air traffic; b) Total number of guests; c) Number of establishments in operation; d) Accommodation capacity; e) Net occupancy rate (bed); f) Average stay; g) Number of overnight stays; h) Personnel costs; i) Total revenue from tourist accommodation; j) Number of guests arriving; k) RevPAR (Revenue per Available Room).
The island regions, for being geographically more remote, very dependent on air and sea transport, are always good reasons to understand about their resilience, as it is the case of the ARM in the European space. Since it is a region with political independence (Autonomous Region), there is also the perception of understanding how the responses were caused and especially the impacts in the tourism sector. The contribution of the tourism sector to the regional GDP represents between 25% and 30% of RAM’s GDP and accounts for about 12% to 15% of the jobs created in the region (ARDITI, 2015).