European airport traffic is going from strength to strength. That's according to the latest statistics released by ACI-Europe (the European arm of Airports Council International) for January 2023. Airport traffic is up 69% compared to the same month in 2021, with international traffic up 85% and domestic traffic up 35%. Airport traffic reaches 89% of the pre-crisis level (January 2019), is still experiencing a significant improvement compared to December 2022, which had reached 86% of the 2019 level. 

Germany lags behind

According to the statistics gathered by ACI-Europe, eleven domestic markets managed to regain the growth momentum of 2019, compared to only one in December 2022. Compared to January 2019, the best performances thus came from airports in Portugal (+12.8%), Cyprus (+11.2%) and Luxembourg (+9%), followed by those in Croatia (+5.4%), Malta (+3.6%) and Romania (+3.2%). Conversely, airports in Slovakia (-45.2%), Slovenia (-44.1%), the Czech Republic (-33.3%) and Germany (-31.7%) are still well below their pre-crisis levels, but seem to be impacted by the consequences of the conflict in Ukraine and are also suffering from a lack of penetration or a loss of low-cost traffic. Among the very large European markets, apart from the underperformance of German airports, the airports of Spain (+2.2%), Italy (-4.7%), France (-11%) and Great Britain (-14.3%). 

Istanbul tops the list of most dynamic European airports

With regard to the five largest European airports, Istanbul airport had the highest number of passengers in January 2023 with 5.64 million, a growth of 62.6% compared to January 2022 and 8.1% compared to the pre-crisis level in January 2019. London-Heathrow (5.49 million passengers) and Paris CDG (4.72 million passengers) follow. These traffic volumes represent growth of 111.2% and 73.2% respectively compared to January 2022, but are still 7.4% and 12.1% lower than in 2019. Madrid comes next with a total of 4.43 million passengers which, along with Istanbul, is the only major European airport to have exceeded the January 2019 level (+1%). Amsterdam Schiphol closes the top 5 with traffic of 3.9 million passengers, up 56.6% on January 2022, but still down 22.2% on January 2019.