Fiumicino's 2024 record: scary passenger growth. Only one airport has done better among Europe's top 100
There are two Englishmen, two Germans and two Spaniards. No, this is not the beginning of one of those jokes -- but a [...]
MUC
There are two Englishmen, two Germans, and two Spaniards. No, this is not the beginning of one of those jokes -- but part of the top 10 published by Airport Council International (ACI) regarding the airports with the highest passenger traffic volumes in 2024.
In this article:
The 'British two' are London Heathrow and London Gatwick airports, which placed first and ninth respectively, the 'German two' Frankfurt and Munich (sixth and tenth respectively), and the 'Spanish two' Madrid and Barcelona, which placed fifth and sixth.
In the top 10 busiest airports in the Old Continent. there is also one Italian: Rome Fiumicino, which is in eighth place.
Here is, however, the top 10 with Europe's ten mega-stations and comparison with the same figure in 2023:
- London Heathrow With 83,860,00 passengers (+5.9% compared to 2023)
- Istanbul With 79,988,272 passengers (+4.9% over 2023)
- Paris Charles De Gaulle With 70,290,260 passengers (+4.3%)
- Amsterdam Schipol With 66,828,453 passengers (+8%)
- Madrid With 66,196,984 passengers (+9.9%)
- Frankfurt With 61,564,957 passengers (+3.7%)
- Barcelona With 55,034,955 passengers (+10.3&)
- Rome Fiumicino with 49,203,734 passengers (+21,4%)
- London Gatwick With 43,248,000 passengers (+5.7%)
- Monaco With 41,578,644 passengers (+12.2%)
Highlights, in this top 10, the performance of Fiumicino, which over the course of a year saw the number of passengers passing through it increase by more than a fifth (compared to the 2023 figure). The year-on-year traffic growth reported by Italy's main airport was the highest among all of Europe's top 100 airports, with the sole exception of Tirana where traffic grew between 2023 and 2024 by 47.6%, from 7,257,634 to 10,709,253 passengers.
Among the top 100 airports on the continent, in addition to Fiumicino, there are as many as 12 Italian airports: Milan Malpensa, with its 29,910,368 travelers (+10.95 over 2023) ranked 22nd; Bergamo with 17,353,573 (+8.6%) in 34th place; Naples, Catania and Venice finished 46th, 47th and 48th respectively; Bolognat 53rd; Milan Linate 55th; Palermo 65th; Bari 74th; Pisa 86th; Cagliari 90th and Turin 98th.
Airport Council International also compared last year's traffic volumes with those of 2019, the last year before the pandemic, highlighting once again how the recovery of the last two to three years of air travel has been so impetuous that it has left behind the consequences of the Covid.
The CAI has, in this case, Divided the continent's air terminals into five categories (Major airports, mega airports, large airports, medium airports and small airports) highlighting for each category the five airports that grew the most in terms of traffic compared to the data recorded in 2019.
Fiumicino is also among the frontrunners in this ranking, as among 'major' airports it was second only to Istanbul with a growth in passengers that was by 12.3% compared with the 2019 figure.
Turkey's largest airport did even better with 16.9% more 'admissions' than five years earlier and is followed among 'major airports' in third place by Madrid (+7,2%), Barcelona (+4.4%) and London Heathrow (+3,7%). Among mega airports, the best in a comparison with 2019 was Athens with +24.5%; among the big airports Sochi (in Russia) even saw its passengers more than double compared to five years earlier (+103.1%); between airports medi Tirana more than tripled them (+220.8%), while between the small airports Bucharest Baneasa (the Romanian capital's secondary airport) even more than quadrupled them (+345.9%), a clear sign that the post-pandemic recovery has been pervasive and homogeneous, and has not only affected the Old Continent's main airports.
