Flights to Brussels fall amid security lockdown

The city’s metro and schools reopened today as the city began to edge back to normal, but figures have revealed how flight bookings to Brussels collapsed as police searched for suspects from the Paris terror attack.

The latest figures from travel data analyst ForwardKeys showed that net bookings, which take into account both daily bookings and cancellations, dropped 159% at the beginning of the weekend, when the lockdown came into force.

In the previous week, which directly followed the Paris attacks, bookings were 23% down.

Olivier Jager, co-founder and chief executive of ForwardKeys, said: “If bookings are 100% down that indicates that no net bookings were made.

“159% down means that in addition to no bookings being made, there were cancellations equal to 59% of the number of bookings made on the equivalent day last year.”

The data also examined the source markets for travel to Brussels, the UK (-191%), Italy (-206.5%) and Austria (-236%) were proportionately the worst affected and virtually every source market has experienced net cancellations since the lockdown came in to force.

There was a positive note however - an analysis of forward bookings showed that business travel bookings for the weeks of December 7 and 14 were running significantly ahead of last year, suggesting that a significant proportion of business trips to Brussels had actually been postponed by a fortnight rather than cancelled outright.