Passenger traffic at European airports up 3.9% during August

European airport trade body, ACI EUROPE this morning released its comprehensive report of airport traffic performance during the month of August. The report – which encompasses all scheduled air traffic at Europe’s airports, including networks carriers, low cost carriers, charter and others – reveals a much better performance compared to July, reflecting improvements in economic sentimentacross Europe.

The overall passenger traffic at the continent’s airports registered a robust increase of +3.9% compared with August 2012. At EU airports passenger traffic increased by +2.4%, mainly driven by significant growth in Poland, the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia & Finland, Portugal, Slovenia, Lithuania, Croatia and Malta. Meanwhile, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus kept losing traffic. Passenger traffic at non-EU airports reported very dynamic growth at +9.3%, led by Turkey, Russia, Montenegro, FYROM and Serbia.

However, overall freight traffic growth among European airports was flat at 0.0%, while aircraft movements (an indicator of airline capacity) at European airports also reported a flat figure of +0.2%.

This brings the Year-to-Date results (January to August) in at +2.1% in passenger traffic growth (+0.3% at EU airports and +8.9% at non-EU ones), while freight remains negative at -0.7% and aircraft movements are still down -2.1%, when compared with the same period in 2012.

In terms of traffic categories, comparing August with August in 2012, 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 an average increase of +4.1%, +3.7%, +3.3% and +6.1% respectively.

The airports that experienced the highest increase in passenger traffic per group, when comparing August 2013 with August 2012, include:

GROUP 1 airports – Istanbul IST (+14.3%), Moscow DME (+9.5%), Moscow SVO (+8.8%), London LHR (+7.7%) and Paris ORY (+6.0%)

GROUP 2 airports – St Petersburg (+18.8%), Helsinki (+9.0%), Stockholm ARN (+8.1%), Dublin (+7.6%) and Manchester (+7.0%)

GROUP 3 airports – Warsaw WAW (+27.0%), Ankara (+26.4%), Izmir (+10.0%), Alicante (+9.7%) and Bergen (+8.8%)

GROUP 4 airports – Arad (+587.2%), Bucharest BBU (+43.7%), Clermont-Ferrand (+31.3%), Sarajevo (+31.3%) and Kazan (+29.6%)

The ‘ACI EUROPE Airport Traffic Report for August includes 172 airports in total. These airports represent over 88% of European passenger traffic.