Israeli travel departures fell 83% in 2020

The majority of travel was done in January and February before coronavirus hit.

By ZEV STUB
Travelers at Ben-Gurion Airport in March - to bring tourists back to Israel is not an act of lunacy. (photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)
Travelers at Ben-Gurion Airport in March - to bring tourists back to Israel is not an act of lunacy.
(photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)
Israeli travel departures declined 83% in 2020 compared with 2019, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported Tuesday. While the year began with expectations that Israel’s record travel numbers would continue to rise, only 1.5 million departures were recorded for the year.
Not surprisingly, the majority of travel was done before the coronavirus outbreak began. In January and February, there were 543,000 and 452,000 departures, respectively, reflecting a 10% year-on-year increase from January 2019 and a 2% decline for February. In March, when many countries around the world closed their international borders from the middle of the month, there were 100,000 departures, compared with 500,000 a year earlier.
In April, departures fell to an all-time low of 3,000. In the April-July period, there were about 57,000 departures abroad, compared with more than two million in those months in 2019.
Travel restrictions loosened up in August, with quarantine requirements removed for those arriving from “green” countries, and the numbers rose somewhat for the remaining months. There were some 350,000 departures in the last five months of the year, with 96,000 in December.
Virtually all travel was by air out of Ben-Gurion Airport. Some 68,000 people traveled via crossings with Jordan and Egypt, and about 2,400 traveled by sea, mainly at the beginning of the year.