Munich Airport sets yet another record for total passengers

From January through the end of September 2012, Munich Airport handled more passengers than ever before in the first three quarters of a calendar year. The approximately 29.2 million arriving and departing passengers represented an increase of more than 2 percent as compared with the same period a year earlier. At the same time, the average aircraft load factor rose to a new record of 75 percent, which represents a year-on-year improvement of 1.3 percentage points. That means that, on average, three quarters of all seats in planes arriving in or departing from Munich are booked. The 302,000 aircraft movements counted during the first three quarters of this year was 2.7 percent lower than the figure for the first nine months of 2011.

The main factor driving growth in passenger numbers is international traffic. During the first nine months of 2012, 17.5 million passengers took advantage of the attractive continental services offered at Munich Airport. This was a 3.6 percent increase over the previous year. Traffic on routes to and from destinations in Eastern Europe and the CIS states was up 13 percent, and accounted for 760,000 of the passenger total in the continental segment. In addition, routes to and from Egypt and Tunisia have rebounded strongly, with gains in total passengers of 26 and 53 percent, respectively, after the previous year’s sharp drop amid the unrest of the Arab Spring.

Intercontinental traffic at Munich Airport also continues to show healthy growth, with an increase of approximately 2 percent to a total of 4.3 million passengers in the first three months of the year. There has been a veritable boom in travel to the United Arab Emirates, which is up 24 percent. A total of 820,000 passengers traveled between Munich and destinations in the Gulf states – a 26 percent increase. Passenger traffic on routes to Japan was up by 22 percent in the first nine months of this year as compared with the same period in 2011, when travel decreased sharply after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The volume of airfreight handled in Munich during the first nine months of the year was down by nearly 5 percent, to just over 204,000 tons.

Detailed traffic figures for the first nine months: