European airport trade body ACI EUROPE today published its April 2024 air traffic report, showing passenger traffic across the European airport network grew by +8.5% in April compared to the same month last year. This resulted in volumes being just -0.2% below the pre-pandemic (2019) level.
The non-EU market performed better, with passenger traffic up by +13.4% compared to the same month last year, thanks to the rapid growth recorded by the airports of Kazakhstan (+150%), Albania (+67%), Uzbekistan (+54%) and the airports of the largest market Turkey (+19%), which also grew strongly. The non-EU market exceeded pre-pandemic (April 2019) levels by +5.6%, despite the geopolitical situation which resulted in a total loss of passenger traffic at Ukrainian airports and significant declines at airports in Israel (-42%) and Russia (-22%).
Meanwhile, the EU+ market2 saw passenger traffic increasing by +7.7% in April compared to the same month last year. The best performances came from airports in Estonia (+28%), the Czech Republic (+18%), Slovenia (+17%) and Poland (+17%), while the weakest ones came from those in Sweden (-0.1%), Ireland (+0.6%), Latvia (+1.8%) and Portugal (+2.4%).
The EU+ market came very close to a full recovery of its pre-pandemic volumes (April 2019) at -1.1%, but with significant performance gaps amongst national markets:
– Airports in markets relying on leisure and Visiting Friends and Relatives demand far exceeded 2019 volumes, including those in Greece (+21.7%), Croatia (+20.9%), Poland (+20.3%), Malta (+18.5%), Iceland (+17.2%), Luxembourg (+17%) and Portugal (+13.6%).
– Conversely, airports in Finland (-30.6%), Slovenia (-29.5%), Slovakia (-24.1%) and Sweden (-23.6%) remained the farthest from recovering their pre-pandemic volumes.
– Amongst the largest EU+ markets, the best performance also came from airports predominantly relying on leisure and Visiting Friends and Relatives demand with Italy (+13.9%) and Spain (+10.8%) expanding on their pre-pandemic volumes, followed by the UK (-3.9%), France (-6.9%) and further behind Germany (-19.2%).
Amongst Mega and Large airports, the highest increases in April came from Antalya (+58% vs. Apr 2023 | +8.6% vs. Apr 2019), Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen (+20.6% vs. Apr 2023 | +13.2% vs. Apr 2019), Prague (+17.3% vs. Apr 2023 | -11% vs. Apr 2019), Munich (+17.1% vs. Apr 2023 | -14% vs. Apr 2019), Athens (+16.2% vs. Apr 2023 | +21.5% vs. Mar 2019) and Budapest (+16% vs. Apr 2023 | +4.1% vs. Apr 2019).
Medium airports posted the best performance in April when compared to pre-pandemic (April 2019) levels at +9.4%. Airports reporting the highest increases in that category included Zadar (+105% vs. Apr 2023 | +45.3% vs. Apr 2019), Girona (+87.9% vs. Apr 2023 | -2.7% vs. Apr 2019), Tirana (+67.2% vs. Apr 2023 | +260% vs. Apr 2019), Sarajevo (+49.4% vs. Apr 2023 | +49% vs. Apr 2019), Chisinau (+44% vs. Apr 2023 | +15.3% vs. Apr 2019) and Erzurum (+43.2% vs. Apr 2023 | +22.8% vs. Apr 2019).
As in the past months, larger Low Cost bases kept outperforming when compared to pre-pandemic levels (March 2019): Memmingen (+76.4%), Beauvais (+72%), Bergamo (+32.5%) and Charleroi (+24.5%).
Conversely, Small airports posted the weakest performance with a +4.4% increase in passenger traffic in April compared to the same month last year – and remained -31.5% below their pre-pandemic levels (Apr 2019).
Throughout April, airports welcoming more than 40 million passengers per year (Majors), airports welcoming between 25 and 40 million passengers (Mega), airports welcoming between 25 and 10 million passengers (Large), airports welcoming between 1 million and 10 million passengers per year (Medium), and airports welcoming between 1000 and 1 million passengers (Small) reported an average change in passenger traffic of -1.6%, +2.6%, -6%, +9.4% and -31.5% as compared to their pre-pandemic (April 2019) levels.
