A quarter of European airports again receive the same number of passengers as before corona | Abroad

By 2021, European airports could almost double the number of passengers. “The increase in passenger traffic last year was phenomenal,” said ACI Europe’s general manager, Olivier Jankovec, in a press release. “It started at the beginning of spring when most of the travel restrictions were finally lifted, then boomed in the summer and passenger traffic remained resilient after that.”
But there is no full recovery yet, Jankovic adds. “European airports were still short of 500 million passengers compared to where they were before the corona pandemic hit.”

According to ACI Europe, 27 percent of airports managed to welcome at least the same number of passengers last year as in 2019. These are mainly smaller, regional airports. “The best performance compared to 2019 came from airports that rely mainly on leisure travel, with a significant presence of low-cost carriers and with little or no exposure to Asia (where there were still many travel restrictions in a number of countries last year, ed.).”

One of those airports is that of Charleroi, where the Irish budget airline Ryanair is the largest customer. The Hainaut airport received a record number of almost 8.3 million passengers in 2021, slightly more (0.6 percent) than in 2019. Brussels South Charleroi Airport was also the only airport in Belgium to return to the same level as before the corona pandemic . Brussels Airport, for example, the largest passenger airport in the country, clocked up almost 19 million passengers last year, or 72 percent of the level before the corona crisis.

Jankovec is cautiously positive for 2023, despite uncertainty due to, for example, geopolitical tensions such as the war in Ukraine. The outlook is improving due to China’s reopening, receding recession fears and inflation slowing.

ACI Europe claims to represent more than 500 airports in 55 countries, through which more than 90 percent of commercial air traffic in Europe passes.