EU airport traffic in recession for second month running

Following last month’s announcement of EU airport traffic falling into recession, the latest traffic figures for Europe’s airports reveal flat growth for overall European passenger traffic, with continued bad news for EU airports in particular. Overall European passenger traffic in the month of November reported growth of just +0.6%. However, this positive figure is down to a ‘two speed Europe’ with passenger traffic growth at EU airports recording a decrease: -1.3% while non-EU airports saw an average +8.2% increase.

The overall freight traffic among European airports (EU & non-EU) stood at -0.5% in November, after reporting much worse figures at various times in the past 18 months. Aircraft movements at European airports continued to report a firmly negative figure of -3.6%, reflecting the reluctance of airlines to add capacity at the start of the winter season.

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 November 2012 an average increase of +1.0%, +2.2%, -0.5% and -2.6% respectively when compared with November 2011.

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

• GROUP 1 airports – Istanbul IST (+18.7%), Moscow DME (+12.5%), Antalya (+4.9%), London LGW (+4.3%) and London LHR (+3.1%)
• GROUP 2 airports – Moscow SVO (+12.8%), Nice (+12.0%), Geneva (+9.5%), Manchester (+8.7%) and Berlin TXL (+8.6%)
• GROUP 3 airports – Bucharest (+43.1%), Faro (+14.7%), St Petersburg (+11.5%), Toulouse TLS (+10.4%) and Charleroi (+9.8%)
• GROUP 4 airports – Arad (+6,910.0%), Bournemouth (+74.9%), Chita (+40.1%), Vilnius (+30.7%) and Keflavik (+25.0%)

The ‘ACI EUROPE Airport Traffic Report – November 2012’ includes 173 airports in total. These airports represent over 88% of European passenger traffic.

The December & Full Year Traffic Report 2012 will be released in early February.