European airport traffic slips by -4.3% in July – 08/09/09

EUROPE. Passenger traffic at Europe’s airports fell by -4.3% year-on-year in July, Airports Council International (ACI) Europe has reported. Air transport movements dipped by -7.3% compared to a year earlier.
ACI Europe Director General Olivier Jankovec said: “Things aren’t so much improving as getting less worse. The vast majority of European airports continue to lose traffic, albeit at a slower pace than earlier in the year. The real ray of light comes from the trend in freight traffic, which is substantially above the -20% barrier for the first time this year. However, this cannot yet be called a recovery.”

The accumulated figure for passenger traffic from January to July 2009 decreased by -8.7% compared with the corresponding period 2008.

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 decrease of -3.6%, -4.8%, -5.1% and -4.1% respectively when compared with July 2008.

The same comparison of July 2009 with July 2007 demonstrates an average decrease of -4.5%, -6.2%, -5.2% and -4.0% respectively.

Examples of airports that experienced the highest increase in passenger traffic per group, when comparing July 2009 with July 2008, include:

• Group 1 airports – London Heathrow (+0.9%)

• Group 2 airports – Duesseldorf (+2.1%), Athens (+2.0%) and Berlin Tegel (+1.7%)

• Group 3 airports – Milan Linate (+16.9%), Edinburgh (+5.6%) and Berlin Schoenefeld (+3.4%)

• Group 4 airports – Charleroi (+43.1%), Bari (+20.1%) and Bologna (+14.1%).

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