Most airlines are now much smaller than they were before the pandemic. See the 20 biggest airlines in the world ranked by available seats.

Taylor Rains

Aug 14, 2022, 18:19 IST

Most airlines are now much smaller than they were before the pandemic. See the 20 biggest airlines in the world ranked by available seats.

Southwest Airlines.Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock

Airlines worldwide have been on a rollercoaster of schedule and operational challenges since March 2020.
Carriers have shrunk and expanded throughout COVID-19, and today's industry looks different than it did pre-pandemic.

Over the past two and a half years, the airline industry has changed dramatically.

Starting in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced carriers around the globe to shrink and modify their schedules as travel halted and countries closed their borders. Pilots sought early retirement, employees were furloughed, and aircraft were parked.

However, the strong post-pandemic demand is flipping the industry on its head. With travel rebounding faster than expected, airlines are making moves to keep up, like buying new planes, flying new routes, and launching aggressive hiring campaigns to get more feet on the ground and in the air to keep the operation running smoothly.

Globally, airlines carried an estimated 2.2 billion people and flew 22.2 million flights in 2021, reported research company Finances Online, citing data from the International Aviation Transportation Agency (IATA). That compares to 1.8 billion in 2020, which was just 40% of the 4.5 billion carried in 2019, per IATA.

With all the upheaval, which airlines are now the largest in the world? Turns out the US' "Big Four" airlines, including American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Southwest Airlines, as well as several Chinese carriers, made the top-20 list with hundreds of millions of seats offered in 2021, according to data from London-based aviation analytics firm Official Airline Guide (OAG).

The organization also provided 2018's data set to Insider in 2019, which revealed American Airlines as the world's largest carrier. Since then, the rankings have changed, with Southwest Airlines becoming the world's largest carrier in terms of seats. Several airlines that made the top 20 list in 2018 offered significantly fewer seats in 2021.

Meanwhile, there are a handful of carriers, like JetBlue Airways and Hainan Airlines, that were not part of the 2018 data set but increased capacity last year to make the list.

Here are the world's 20 biggest airlines in the world by the number of seats made available to customers: