Article from BTNews 20 AUGUST 2018
Busiest day yet for Heathrow
Latest statistics issued last week from Britain’s busiest airport show records galore falling by the wayside last month as Heathrow scored the biggest day in its history on 29 July.
The airport welcomed nearly 262,000 passengers in 24hr, while July overall reached unprecedented peaks with more than a quarter of a million passengers travelling through on 19 different days in the month.
More than 7.8m passengers used Heathrow to notch up the 21st consecutive record month, with figures up by 3.7%. The airport’s already popular North American routes saw significant growth of 8.1%.
Heathrow used the figures to add to the clamour over long immigration queues, with CEO John Holland-Kaye joining criticism from British Airways and Virgin Atlantic (see Border chaos in this issue).
He also noted the North America July statistic of a total of 1.8m passengers arriving thanks to larger, fuller aircraft reiterated the need to extend the use of self-service e-gates to countries such as the US and Canada.
In other July figures, Asia-Pacific passenger numbers climbed by 4.2% following new services from Hainan Airlines, Tianjin Airlines and Beijing Capital Airlines, connecting the UK to Changsha, Xi'an and Qingdao.
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