EU airports see weak summer traffic, while non-EU enjoy strong growth

The latest traffic figures for Europe’s airports released today provide more evidence of an underwhelming summer season for the air transport sector. Overall passenger traffic at European airports in the month of August reported growth of just +2.2%. The overall freight traffic among European airports declined by -0.9% in the same period, while aircraft movements (an indicator of airline capacity) at European airports decreased by -1.3%.

The image of a ‘two speed Europe’ in traffic terms continues, with the disparity particularly evident in the August traffic figures. Passenger traffic growth at EU airports recorded a result of +0.3% while non-EU airport passenger traffic saw an average +10.5% increase in passengers, gaining over 4 percentage points on the July average.

Airports welcoming more than 25 million passengers per year (Group 1), airports welcoming between 10 and 25 million passengers (Group 2), airports welcoming between 5 and 10 million passengers (Group 3) and airports welcoming less than 5 million passengers per year (Group 4) reported for August 2012 an average increase of +2.5%, +2.3%, +2.8% and +0.9% respectively when compared with August 2011.

In terms of the year-to-date passenger traffic results at European airports, comparison with the same period in 2011 reveals an average increase of +2.5%, +2.5%, +2.3% and +1.5% respectively, across the 4 traffic groups.

Airports that experienced the highest increase in passenger traffic per group, when comparing August 2012 with August 2011, include:

GROUP 1 airports – Istanbul IST (+26.0%), Moscow DME (+7.1%), Barcelona (+6.9%), Frankfurt (+4.6%) and Antalya (+3.8%)

GROUP 2 airports – Istanbul SAW (+17.8%), Moscow SVO (+15.4%), Berlin TXL (+12.7%), Nice (+11.0%) and Geneva (+8.7%)

GROUP 3 airports – Bucharest OTP (+54.9%), Marseille (+24.1%), Charleroi (+19.2%), Ankara (+18.3%) and Izmir (+16.3%)

GROUP 4 airports – Arad (+12,847.1%), Vatry (+115.2%), Zadar (+35.8%), Sandefjord (+32.3%) and Montchiari (+29.5%)

The ‘ACI EUROPE Airport Traffic Report – August 2012’ includes 167 airports in total. These airports represent over 88% of European passenger traffic.