Travel must resume, says Sydney airport boss Geoff Culbert

The CEO of Australia’s largest gateway is leading the call for international travel to resume as quickly as possible.

Sydney Airport' CEO Geoff Culbert who is keen to see international travel resume as quickly as possible. Picture: Chris Pavlich

The CEO of Australia’s biggest gateway, Sydney Airport, has called for international travel to resume as quickly as possible so the country does not get locked out of global aviation markets.

Buoyed by the success of screening processes adopted at the airport for passengers arriving from Victoria, Geoff Culbert said the country needed to keep moving forward towards a full reopening of the economy.

“We need to take the momentum and focus on what’s next, starting with getting the trans-Tasman bubble up and running,” he said.

“We then need to look at getting international travel happening as quickly as possible. I’m getting daily calls from airports and airlines throughout Asia who are raring to restore travel links to Australia.”

Mr Culbert said the airport had adopted a sophisticated approach to screening travellers, working closely with health authorities and other government agencies.

He said that should serve as a template to how restrictions could gradually be eased.

“My view is that we need to learn to live with the virus and manage the risk rather than eradicate the risk,” Mr Culbert said.  “When we see issues evolve and spot fires break out we need to take a very specific approach to that. If that means that we implement additional procedures at that point in time to ensure we don’t have to shut down the entire economy and go backwards, that’s what we should be doing.”

His call followed five consecutive months of declining passenger numbers for Sydney Airport, with international and domestic traffic down a disastrous 97.4 per cent in May.

In April the airport established an additional $850m of bank debt facilities, increasing liquidity to $2.8bn, which was expected to alleviate the need to raise equity.

Despite Mr Culbert’s confidence about the airport’s financial position, he warned that it was wrong to think the resurgence of domestic tourism could somehow compensate for the loss of international travel.

“That’s a dangerous narrative for us to get into and we can’t be seduced by that,” Mr Culbert said.

“It’s a false equivalency because it fails to recognise the billions of dollars generated through other types of international travel beyond tourism, such as business travel, major events, conferences, visiting friends and relatives, education, exports and imports.”

Although he would not put a timeline on the reopening of Australia’s borders to the world, Mr Culbert indicated that mid-2021 was too long to wait.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce recently announced he did not expect any significant international flying to occur before July 2021, unless a COVID-19 vaccine became available.

But Mr Culbert said a detailed template had been established for the trans-Tasman bubble that could easily be adopted for other “COVID-safe” countries.

“We’re getting a lot of requests from airlines and airports around the world to establish airbridges to Australia and we’re talking about the usual suspects, the likes of Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Canada. There’s a huge amount of demand — we’re seen as a safe place to travel,” he said.

“Those countries have done a good job of managing the virus themselves and so it’s important we start to engage with them and make the case for why opening up travel between Australia and those destinations is really critical to the economies at both ends.”

Failure to offer certainty around Australia’s borders could prove costly in the longer term with international airlines due to determine schedules for the northern summer, following the next World Routes conference in September.

Mr Culbert said Australia was a very desirable destination because of the way the country had managed the COVID crisis but if it remained isolated, the price of that success could be very high.

“What we’re seeing is a lot of other countries start to open up cross-border travel — we’re seeing that happen in Europe,” he said.

“Airlines will start to allocate their available capacity for long haul travel to countries from October and November of this year and if we are not in that conversation then we miss the cycle.

“Once airlines establish route networks and if those networks are profitable, there’s no motivation for them to switch the metal to fly back down to Australia and we get locked out of the market for a long period.”

Melbourne Airport CEO Lyell Strambi was less optimistic about a resumption of international travel soon, suggesting it would be “really challenging” without a vaccine or antiviral treatment.

The airport marked its 50th anniversary this week with a low-key celebration and Mr Strambi said it would be a long time before any sort of normality returned.

“You really can’t open up your borders without promoting a second or third wave (of infection),” Mr Strambi said.

“I do think we have to steel ourselves for the fact that international travel to and from Australia is going to be very difficult for a period of time.

“We’re hopeful of a strong resurgence in the domestic market and frankly we need it.”