The trade association representing Europe’s airports, ACI Europe, has released the final numbers for traffic at European airports in 2023, figures showing an uneven recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with Brussels Airport lagging behind other travel hubs.
ACI Europe predicted last year that traffic would finally surpass 2019 levels this year, but already foresaw significant variations in passenger traffic performance, from -34% to over 100%. Consistently, while the average recovery across Europe’s airports stood at 94.7% of pre-pandemic figures, Brussels Airport, which welcomed 22.3 million passengers in 2023, only recovered 84.2% of its 2019 traffic.
2023 has also been a year of multi-speed recovery and great divergences for Europe’s airports in terms of passenger traffic. While many exceeded their previous yearly record in passenger volumes, 57% still remained below their pre-pandemic volumes.
Olivier Jankovec, Director General of ACI Europe
Overall, 2.3 billion passengers passed through European airports last year, 19% more than in 2022. The increase was driven by international passenger traffic (+21%), which grew at almost twice the pace of domestic passenger traffic (+11.7%), with airports in the EU+ (EU, EEA, Switzerland and the UK) market (+19%) overperforming those in the rest of Europe (Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Northern Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan) market (+16%), ACI Europe explained in a statement.
The uneven recovery was not only seen at national level, but also between airports in the same country. Within the EU+ markets, airports in Portugal (+12.2%), Greece (+12.1%), Iceland (+6.9%), Malta (+6.7%) and Poland (+4.5%) outperformed, while those in Finland (-29.6%), Slovenia (-26.2%), Germany (-22.4%) and Sweden (-21%) remained well behind a full recovery. Amongst the largest EU+ markets, airports in Spain and Italy were the only ones having fully recovered, followed by those in France (-5.4%), the UK (-6.4%) and airports in Germany underperforming by a wide margin.
In the rest of Europe, airports in the emerging markets of Uzbekistan (+110%), Armenia (+66%) and Kazakhstan (+51%) saw exponential growth in part due to traffic diversions to/from Russia, along with those in Albania (+117%) and Kosovo (+44%) on the back of ultra low‑cost airlines deploying their capacity. Meanwhile, airports in the major market of Türkiye (+2.5%) just exceeded their pre-pandemic levels.
At the other end of the spectrum, the passenger traffic recovery of airports in Israel (-12%) was pulled in reverse, with their Q4 passenger traffic (-63%) collapsing, while airports in Ukraine (-100%) remained shuttered due to the ongoing war. “Looking ahead at 2024, we are likely to see these performance gaps amongst airports narrowing – but not closing. There is no doubt geopolitical tensions are part of our new reality, and so are structural changes in the aviation market”, said ACI Europe Director General, Olivier Jankovec.
While 2023 ended lower than expected, at -5.3% compared to previously predicted -4.5%, ACI Europe is maintaining its outlook for 2024 to exceed pre-Covid volumes by 1.4%.
