2011-11-16 12:00:53
Budapest Airport: Huge traffic in October
Passenger traffic is continuing to break records at Budapest Airport. Unlike in previous years, there was hardly any decrease after the end of the summer holiday season, as traffic in October exceeded 800 000 passengers for the first time ever. It looks increasingly likely that the upward trend will persist in the last few months of the year, which would mean Budapest Airport registering the busiest year on record.
845 815 – this is the exact number of passengers who used Budapest Airport’s terminals this October, which is an increase of 9.2% (over 71 000 more) compared to the same month last year. The annual traffic increase this year now stands at 8.6% (or 6.5% discounting the impact of the volcanic eruption in Iceland last year). The airport handled 7.64 million passengers from January to October, which is also the best result ever during this period, and exceeds last year’s performance by more than 600 000 passengers. Forecasts suggest that the upward trend will last during the final months of the year as well, so all conditions are in place to fulfill Budapest Airport’s expectation of traffic reaching 8.7 million by the end of the year.
The number of transfer passengers increased significantly; the October figure was 42% higher than last year. The main reason for this is the excellent performance of Malév; the Hungarian carrier followed up its good transfer performance in September with an equally outstanding showing in October.
Traffic on long haul flights continued to increase dynamically, by more than 80%, which is primarily attributable to the daily American Airlines flight to New York and the Qatar Airways flight to Doha, which has also been operating on a daily basis since September. It is interesting that the traffic of the low cost carriers has shown a slight decrease after the strong start to the year. This segment is expected to recover at the end of the year, primarily due to the Christmas holiday season, but a further decrease is likely until then. On the whole, low cost traffic still increased by 4.1% so far during this year.
“We have never registered such a high volume of traffic at Budapest Airport during the month of October before,” commented Kam Jandu, aviation director for Budapest Airport. “The rate of growth exceeds the European average, with the scheduled full service carriers being the main drivers of growth. It is especially important to highlight the dynamic growth of Malév, which is primarily due to the large number of inbound foreign passengers. This has strengthened transfer traffic at Budapest Airport, which in turn underlines the importance of the recent handover of two new passenger security screening lanes for transfer. I am positive that we will be able to reach 8.7 million passengers by the end of the year.”