Our annual review of the Most Connected Airports in the World – Megahubs has taken a different steer this year as any rankings will have had the impact of Covid 19 inevitably at the heart of them.

That said – tracking our Megahubs and understanding their recovery path will be a critical story in 2021 so through our new  visual series Hubwatch, we take a look at the Top 20 most connected airports in the world (as they were in 2019) and how connected globally they are are right now compared to last year.

We have identified the distribution of their international networks by region between October 2019 and October 2020 and plotted this on a series of radar charts. We show for each of the Top 20 Megahubs in 2019, their network by region – across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America and Latin America. You can switch the view between each period or view them overlaid. A stark comparison for many airports but we can only hope that all our OAG Megahubs return to their 2019 position and go from strength to strength in future.

HubWatch shows how our Asia Megahubs are currently experiencing the biggest constraints on their global spread are the Asian hubs - Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi (BKK), Jakarta (CGK), Hong Kong (HKG), Seoul Incheon (ICN), Kuala Lumpur (KUL) and Singapore (SIN) – all impacted by the continued international restrictions both within Asia stopping intra-regional travel and beyond.

By contrast, some of our big US megahubs in our list – Atlanta (ATL), Chicago O’Hare (ORD), Dallas Fort Worth (DFW), New York (JFK) and Los Angeles (LAX) appear to benefit from the large US domestic market, and their proximity to Latin America, where travel between the US and Mexico is still taking place, and some of Latin America’s biggest country markets are re-opening after the first wave of COVID.

Updated regularly and derived from OAG’s Schedules Analyzer, for more analysis visit our HubWatch page.