An Air Traffic Rebound Comparison Between Romania and the European Union: A Post-Pandemic Scenario of Boarding-Time Minimization Potential

This research offers a comprehensive inspection of the Romanian air transportation domain inside the European Union using existing academic papers in order to perform an experimental analysis of boarding time and cost minimization and to estimate the gross experimental monetary economization. A total of three purposes are defined for the analysis: defining a comparative investigation of a total of 23 European Union countries for 2025 data extracted from Eurostat, excluding France, Estonia, Malta and Belgium due to the lack of data; performing a national and airport-level analysis for the Romanian air transportation sector using Romanian Airport Association observations; and extracting the passenger downfall for 2020–2022 period caused by the COVID-19 pandemic for all 27 countries from the European Union. At the same time, a presentation of the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was calculated by comparing the 2020 passenger values compared to those from 2019, besides a cumulative impact of the 2020–2022 period compared to the 2019 values. Romania, for instance, registered a downfall of 69.1% in 2020 compared to 2019. A total of five boarding techniques extracted from the academic community were tested in order to identify the optimum method from a theoretical perspective and the most feasible one to be implemented by airline companies. According to the outcomes, the assigned-seat technique saves the most cost and time, but the feasibility level is very limited, due to the difficulties in implementation and communicating to the passengers, while WILMA stands as the most feasible method, but it does not save a similar amount of time and costs. The calculated monetary values stand as gross theoretical amounts instead of realized savings of air transportation companies, and their practical potential should be demonstrated by validating the outcomes on flight-level data and if boarding procedures rely on the critical turnaround path.