October 2012 traffic figures

Heathrow saw 6 million passengers pass through its terminals last month, down 0.1% on October last year. Hurricane Sandy in the US led to just over 200 flight cancellations and a drop in passengers, many of whom are expected to have rebooked onto flights in November.

The late half term also resulted in fewer passengers passing through the airport, a number which again is expected to be mostly recovered in November. Without these two events, passengers for October would have been up by 1.7%.

Across the month, passengers to North America were up 0.3% compared with October last year. European passenger traffic was up 0.9% overall with a 4.5% rise to Germany, but fell 9.6% to Greece, 7.3% to France and 2.3% to Italy. Of the BRIC economies, passenger numbers were up 5.7% to Brazil, 2.9% to Russia and 4.3% to China, but down 7.3% to India, due to airlines reducing or ceasing services.

Customer satisfaction scores have continued to improve at Heathrow. The latest results from the independent benchmarking programme run by ACI (Airports Council International) gave Heathrow its best ever score in Q3. 75% of passengers rated their experience at the airport as either ‘Excellent’ or ‘Very Good’.

Chief Executive for Heathrow, Colin Matthews, said:

“We are delighted to report record customer satisfaction scores. We are determined to keep on improving Heathrow for passengers and are investing £20 million every week in new facilities.”

View full press release and traffic statistics tables for October 2012 (272KB PDF)