From Cartagena to Cali: Exploring Colombia's aviation growth story

For this month's aviation industry webinar, Deirdre Fulton and John Grant were joined by Valeria Bucheli (Senior Tourism Representative - Head of Aviation, ProColombia) to discuss the dynamic growth of Colombia's aviation market and the driving forces behind it.

The panel discussed:

• What is driving the rapid growth of air services in Colombia
• Who is travelling internationally and to where
• Airline expansion strategies - examining the players, their approaches, and the reasons behind them

A look at growth trends

First, the panel began by taking a look at global growth trends:

• Global capacity growth for the year to date remains steady, at 3% ahead of last year.
• NOTE: 2025 is the yellow line, 2024 is the grey line, 2019 is the black line, and the green dotted line shows where capacity would have been had pre-2019 growth trends continued.

Colombia: A market overview

Next, the panel gave some context on Colombia's market in capacity terms:

• This month, Colombia is the 23rd largest market in capacity terms globally, with 10.7m seats across both domestic and international markets.
• Only Brazil and Mexico are bigger in terms of Latin America competitors, driven by their much larger populations leading to very large domestic air markets.
• Over the last 25 years, Colombia has seen capacity grow at a CAGR rate of 5.8%, second only to Panama, amongst the Top 10 in Latin America.

Colombia's post-covid recovery

While looking at Colombia's growth trends over the past decade, the panel discussed the strategies taken during and coming out of the pandemic that helped boost their post-Covid recovery:

A strategic location for inbound travel

Next, the panel highlighted the importance of Colombia's location and the opportunities it provides to connect with travellers from across the Americas:

And what about outbound travel?

Off the back of the previous slide, the panel discuss outbound travel - where are Colombians flying to?

Watch the full webinar:

There's so much more to discover in the full panel discussion - for more insights, watch below:

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