Europe’s airports report increases

ACI Europe, the airport trade association, today releases its traffic report for April 2018, during which average passenger traffic in geographical Europe grew by +5% compared with the same month last year.

As has occurred in previous months, the non-EU market led the growth dynamic, holding fast at +10.4%, on the back of Turkish airports increasing their passenger traffic by an impressive +13.9%.  Gains were especially strong at airports in Georgia (+30.5%), Ukraine (+20.4%) as well as in the smaller markets including Montenegro (+15.5%) and Albania (+11.5%).

Meanwhile, passenger traffic growth in the EU market increased by +3.4% – a notable deceleration compared with earlier months (Q1: +6.2%).

This was mainly due to the combination of labour disruptions, the continued impact of the bankruptcies of Monarch and Air Berlin, stronger tourism demand to Turkey and Northern Africa impacting some EU leisure airports – as well as the Easter holiday period starting earlier (in March) when compared to last year.

The Majors (top 5 European airports) saw passenger growth weakening to +2.4% compared to +9.6% in Q1. The Air France strikes had an impact on Paris CDG (-3.5%) – so far, the airport has lost more than 700.000 passengers due to industrial action at the airline.  There were also lower passenger numbers at London Heathrow (-2.2%).  Istanbul Atatürk (+10.7%) kept posting the best performance amongst the league, followed by Frankfurt (+5.8%) and Amsterdam Schiphol (+3.0%).

Freight traffic retained its recent robust growth trend during April at +3.9%. Aircraft movements were up +4.3% – increasing by +3.2% in the EU market and by +7.5% in the non-EU bloc. 

www.aci-europe.org

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