European passenger traffic up by 1.8% during the first half of the year

European airport trade body, ACI EUROPE this morning released the first comprehensive report of airport traffic performance for H1 2013. The report includes all scheduled air traffic at Europe’s airports, including networks carriers, low cost carriers, charter and others.

The overall passenger traffic at the continent’s airports registered an increase of +1.8% during the first 6 months of the year, compared with the same period in 2012. At EU airports passenger traffic decreased by -0.2% while non-EU airports led by Turkey, Russia, Iceland and Norway reported dynamic growth of +9.8%.

Overall freight traffic among European airports still remained negative at -0.9%, while aircraft movements (an indicator of airline capacity) at European airports also decreased by -2.9%.

Olivier Jankovec, Director General ACI EUROPE commented “Behind a rather contrasted performance for the first half of the year, passenger traffic is finally improving for EU airports. In June – for the second month – EU passenger traffic returned to growth at +1.8%. This is consistent with the fact that economic sentiment across the Eurozone is generally improving. However, we need to be very cautious. Airlines are still not adding much capacity to the market and freight traffic remains in recession.”

He added “Overall, our traffic figures are pointing to a rather weak and gradual recovery for EU airports against a background of record unemployment, low consumer spending and stringent austerity measures. In that context, plans from France to further increase its aviation tax and from the Walloon authorities in Belgium to impose a new tax on departing passengers, are the last things we need.”

Comparing H1 2013 with the same period in 2012, 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 increase of of +2.1%, +2.1%, +1.4% and -0.3% respectively.

Comparing the month of June with June 2012, reveals the following average increases across the same 4 traffic groups for airports: +3.1%, +4.5%, +2.5% and +3.1% respectively.

The airports that experienced the highest increase in passenger traffic per group, when comparing June 2013 with June 2012, include:

• GROUP 1 airports – Moscow SVO (+14.2%), Istanbul IST (+12.1%), Moscow DME (+9.1%), Antalya (+7.0%) and Amsterdam (+5.2%)
• GROUP 2 airports – Istanbul SAW (+22.7%), St Petersburg (+17.1%), Berlin TXL (+12.2%), Oslo (+7.0%) and Lisbon (+6.1%)
• GROUP 3 airports – Ankara (+17.1%), Bergen (+12.4%), Alicante (+11.1%), Bologna (+8.8%) and Izmir (+8.2%)
• GROUP 4 airports – Arad (+779.4%), Tivat (+48.6%), Chambery (+45.3%), Chita (+30.9%) and Skopje (+24.9%)

The ‘ACI EUROPE Airport Traffic Report – June, Q2 & H1 2013’ includes 170 airports in total. These airports represent over 88% of European passenger traffic.