Travelling used to be a prerogative of only the rich and famous. It also used to be a rather stressful and exhausting process that could often take as long as a few weeks or months especially if one was travelling abroad. These long journeys were often made once in a lifetime with the traveller never returning to his or her homeland. With the advent of air travel more and more began to indulge in this luxury or at least aim at having the ability to travel to at least one destination throughout their life. As cheap airlines tickets became available more and more people began taking airplanes either to travel on business or for pleasure.
As the need to travel increased due to the fact that businesses became international and people realized the benefits of traveling, airline companies began offering cheaper airfares. These cheaper airfares opened the way to more and more travelling. Discount airline tickets allow almost everyone to opt for holidays abroad or to expand their businesses to more than one country.
The amount of flying passengers is currently running at about 80 percent, and the industry keeps breaking records for the number of people flying each year. The International Civil Aviation Organization reports that 3.5 billion passengers flew somewhere or the other in 2015.
This, however, does not mean that half the world's population travelled in 2015 as one person may have travelled multiple times. As no worldwide database keeps track of the number of discrete individual travelers taking to the air each year determining with any precision how many individual global citizens flew in a year, let alone what percentage of the world's population has ever flown in an airplane, may be impossible.
Statistics provided by U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics estimated, based on its Omnibus Household Survey, in 2003 that one-third of U.S. adults had flown in the previous 12 months. And 18 percent of Americans said they had never flown in their life, meaning that 82 percent had. It is obvious that discount airline tickets have had an impact on the amount of travelers as they make air fares accessible to those of an average income.
This continues and by 2009, the amount of people who flew a commercial airliner in the previous year had risen to 39.85 percent according to Omnibus Household Survey.
These statistics however, refer only to U.S. flyers, and for many parts of the world, information is even scarcer.
Worldwide the amount of flyers also seems to have increases as according to Boeing's market outlook China and the Middle East had the highest increase in air travellers of all regions in 2014 with double-digit traffic growth. Europe traffic grew at five percent in 2014, while North America traffic grew more than two percent.
Whether more people are opting to fly or the same people travel more often remains unknown, what is known, though, is that air traffic has increased while simultaneously cheap airline tickets have become widely available.
Another fact that is also known is that most of these passengers travel on business, this is due to the fact that more and more businesses are now international and have outlets in a variety of countries. Discount airline tickets and cheaper airfares have made this possible.
Nguyen An Tra My
Martin Wynn
