HUNGARY. Budapest Airport, the operator of Budapest Ferihegy International Airport expects to handle almost 5.0 million passengers in 2003, well above previous expectations, the company’s ceo Janos Harskuti told a news conference this week.
Passenger traffic at Budapest International Airport rose +8.3% to 3.76 million in the first nine months of 2003, while the number of flight departures and arrivals increased +12% to 65,433 Harskuti said.
Low-cost carriers, which started services from Budapest this year, contributed 2 percentage points to the total number of flight arrivals/departures. Snowflake and Germanwings launched services in the first half of 2003, and SkyEurope started to fly daily to Paris and London from November.
While the total number of passengers at Budapest rose +8.3%, transit passenger traffic grew by a healthy +33%. This was largely due to the Hungarian carrier Malev took a 56.4% share of the passenger traffic. Lufthansa came second with 11.4% followed by British Airways 3.9%, Air France 3.3% KLM 2.5% and Austrian Airlines 1.6%.
Charter flight passenger numbers rose +25.7% to 14.2% of the total in the nine-month period.
