Question
How the Dubai International Airport (DXB) volume of trips was affected by the Covid-19 quarantine measures?
How-to explanation
In very attractive areas, such as the DXB Airport, the origin of the trips is not as relevant as the focused destination. With the current Covid-19 crisis, the tourism industry being directly affected, the volume of trips to airports around the world all went significantly down.
Therefore, our focus region will be one only polygon: the DXB International Airport. In order to understand the progress of the quarantine measures, we will do a monthly comparison between January and April 2020 (Figure 1).
![](https://d2altcye8lkl9f.cloudfront.net/2020/08/image-221.png)
Reading the results
In OD reports with one polygon only, the most insightful visualization is “Flows Explorer”, where “External” trips can be defined as “origins” (i.e.: all trips that started outside the “DXB Airport” region). Setting “DXB Airport” as our destination, will give us a clear view on the trip distribution through-out the day (Figure 2).
![](https://d2altcye8lkl9f.cloudfront.net/2020/08/image-222.png)
Progress can be assessed by comparing the following months (Figures 3 to 5).
![](https://d2altcye8lkl9f.cloudfront.net/2020/08/image-223.png)
![](https://d2altcye8lkl9f.cloudfront.net/2020/08/image-224.png)
![](https://d2altcye8lkl9f.cloudfront.net/2020/08/image-225.png)
Conclusion
Since the beginning of the quarantine actions taken in Dubai, UAE, the volume of trips going to the Dubai International airport decreased significantly. By using the TomTom O/D Analysis data we could actually see how this decrease progressed month after month, resulting in less 88% of trips when comparing April to January of this year. To make it even a more complete analysis, we could keep performing the same analysis also for the month May and June, to understand if the volume of trips are catching up to the pre-coronavirus standards.
The TomTom O/D Analysis provides a rich, comprehensive and yet very attractive in terms of cost/value benefit. In matter of minutes, the GPS-based trip analytics give you a comprehensive analysis, encompassing large areas and flexible time periods, which would be less efficient and with poor results when performed with manual input questionnaires or only hardware data (e.g.: sensor cameras with limited area range).