Nearly half of European airports recover to pre-pandemic traffic volumes in Apr-2023
ACI EUROPE released (07-Jun-2023) its air traffic report for Apr-2023, with highlights including:
- Passenger traffic in the European airport network grew 21.1% year-on-year, while remaining 7.6% below Apr-2019 levels;
- Airports in Iceland (+14.5% year-on-year), Cyprus (+11.9%), Greece (+11%) Portugal (+10.7%), Bulgaria (+8.7%) and Malta (+8.4%) exceeded their pre-pandemic volumes;
- Airports in Slovenia (-39.8%), Germany (-26.1%), Slovakia (-25.9%) and the Czech Republic (-23.7%) remained the farthest from a full recovery;
- London Heathrow Airport was the busiest airport (+25.9%), followed by Istanbul Airport (+34.3%), Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (+19.3%), Amsterdam Schiphol Airport (+15.6%) and Madrid Barajas Airport (+20.6%);
- Freight traffic across the European airport network decreased 7.8% year-on-year and by 10.5% compared to Apr-2019.
ACI EUROPE director general Olivier Jankovec said: "April has brought us closest ever to a full recovery for passenger traffic. The Easter holidays boosted demand, which clearly kept defying inflationary pressures. This is quite remarkable when the increase in air fares is more than 6 times above consumer price inflation". He added: "Performance variations remained significant across both national and individual airport markets - with only 47% of Europe's airports having fully recovered their pre-pandemic passenger volumes. This reflects established recovery patterns, notably the prominence of leisure & VFR demand, the expansion of ultra-low cost carriers and tight capacity management from most other airlines". [more - original PR]