Weak airport traffic results continue during February

European airport trade body, ACI EUROPE today released its traffic results for the month of February, across the European airport network. The overall passenger traffic at Europe’s airports saw a decrease of -0.2% compared to February 2012.

EU airports continue to experience the sharper end of the traffic scale, a decrease averaging -2.8%, while passenger traffic at non-EU airports reported an average +10.4% growth, when compared with the same month in 2012. Aircraft movements for the whole of Europe reported a decrease of -5.4%, while freight plunged back into negative territory, reporting -6.5%.

However, it should be noted that traffic results from February 2012 benefited from the extra ‘leap year’ day. If we adjust the reported figures to take into account the leap year distortion effect, the key figures for February would see overall European passenger growth of +3.3%, with the EU reporting +0.7% and non-EU reporting +14.3%. Freight & aircraft movements would remain negative, at -1.0% and -2.0% respectively.

Airports welcoming more than 25 million passengers per year (Group 1), airports welcoming between 10 and 25million 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 an average adjustment of +1.2%, -1.0%, +1.6% and -5.1% respectively when compared with February 2012.

Airports that experienced the highest increases in passenger traffic per group, when comparing February 2013 with February 2012 were:

• GROUP 1 Airports – Istanbul IST (+26.5%), Moscow DME (+16.6%), Moscow SVO (+9.4%), Antalya (+3.1%) and London LHR (+1.0%)
• GROUP 2 Airports – Istanbul SAW (+17.7%), St Petersburg (+11.3%), Nice (+8.1%), Berlin TXL (+5.1%) and Geneva (+2.9%)
• GROUP 3 Airports – Bucharest (+53.5%), Izmir (+18.2%), Budapest (+15.7%), Ankara (+15.3%) and Warsaw WAW (+13.4%)
• GROUP 4 Airports – Varna (+24,489.6%), Arad (+176.1%), Chita (+57.2%), Vilnius (+32.4%) and Podgorica (+23.8%)

The ‘ACI EUROPE Airport Traffic Report – February 2013’ includes 170 airports in total representing approximately 88% of European air passenger traffic.

Next month’s March & Q1 Airport Traffic Report will confirm the traffic trends for Europe’s airport industry.