European airport passenger traffic up 0.6% in April

European airport trade body, ACI EUROPE today released its traffic results for the month of April across the European airport network. The overall passenger traffic growth at Europe’s airports remained almost flat, with an increase of just +0.6% compared to April 2012.

Many EU airports continued to experience the sharper end of the traffic scale, reporting a decrease averaging -1.8%, while passenger traffic at non-EU airports reported an average increase of +10.1%, when compared with the same month in 2012. Aircraft movements for the whole of Europe reported a decrease of -0.4%, while freight is still stuck in negative numbers reporting -2.0%.

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 adjustment of +0.3%, +1.5%, -0.6% and 0.8% respectively when compared with April 2012.

Airports that experienced the highest increases in passenger traffic per group, when comparing April 2013 with April 2012 were:

GROUP 1 Airports – Istanbul IST (+15.8%), Moscow SVO (+13.8%), Antalya (+10.8%), Moscow DME (+6.7%) & Amsterdam (+3.3%)

GROUP 2 Airports – Istanbul SAW (+16.1%), St Petersburg (+13.3%), Berlin TXL (+13.2%), Oslo (+12.1%), Stockholm ARN (+5.0%)

GROUP 3 Airports – Bergen (20.5%), Ankara (+20.2%), Izmir (+11.4%), Alicante (+7.6%), Warsaw WAW (+5.7%)

GROUP 4 Airports – Arad (+13,642.1%), Chita (+43.8%), Chelyabinsk (+35.1%), Zadar (+31.0%), Lille (+28.9%)

The ‘ACI EUROPE Airport Traffic Report – April 2013’ includes 179 airports in total representing approximately 88% of European air passenger traffic.