Brazil airports, road terminals expected busy over Easter weekend
The Easter holiday in Brazil should keep airports hectic. The 18 terminals operated by watchdog Infraero alone are expected to welcome 451 thousand travelers Thursday to Monday (Apr. 14–18), up 224 percent from Easter last year, when 139 thousand went on and off board at the terminals controlled by the authority from April 1 to 5.
The estimate was based off the schedule of air carriers and compares estimates for 2022 with the same holiday in 2021, when activities were significantly reduced due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Busier roads
As above, so below. Companies serving road passengers expect a 15 percent activity increase in April from March and twice the level reported in the same time frame last year.
Besides Easter, the hustle and bustle in bus terminals is also linked to Tiradentes, observed in remembrance of one of the leaders in Brazil’s independence movement. Celebrated on April 21, the holiday should see a number of Carnival parades in cities across the country, as festivities had been put off due to the pandemic.
According to land transport association Abrati, in addition to the progress in vaccination and the resumption of domestic tourism, the optimism also stems from travelers switching to buses as a result of recent hikes in air ticket and fuel prices, which make car travel unfeasible for many.
“This could already be observed during the last Carnival holiday, in February. We saw an increase of about 32 percent from the same time span in 2021,” said Abrati representative Letícia Pineschi.
Some 2.8 million passengers used buses for travel in February, 1 million more than February 2021, as per data from Brazil’s national land transport agency ANTT.
“As a result, our outlook is even more optimistic for the upcoming holidays. The number of passengers is likely to soar higher than in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic came in the country,” he noted.
