EUROPE. Total passenger traffic at European airports decreased by -4.1% year-on-year in September, with freight traffic falling -7.8%, Airports Council International (ACI) Europe announced on Friday.
For the first nine months of 2009 passenger traffic was off by -7.7% compared with the same period a year earlier. Freight traffic fell by -19.8% for the nine months.
Airports welcoming more than 25 million passengers per year (Group 1); airports welcoming between 10 and 25 million passengers (Group 2); those welcoming between 5 and 10 million passengers (Group 3); and airports welcoming less than 5 million passengers per year (Group 4) reported average decreases of -3.3%, -6.2%, -4.4% and -4.3%, respectively, when compared with September 2008.
The same comparison of September 2009 with September 2007 (i.e. before the global financial crisis) shows average decreases of -7.5%, -10.3%, -7.3% and -6.1%, respectively.
ACI highlighted the following exceptional examples of airports that experienced year-on-year increases in passenger traffic for September 2009:
Group 1 airports: Madrid (+0.1%)
Group 2 airports: Geneva (+0.4%) and Zürich (+0.1%)
Group 3 airports: Milan Orio Al Serio (+15.8%), Marseille (+5.1%) and Edinburgh (+3.8%)
Group 4 airports: Charleroi (+40.3%), Bologna (+20.1%) and Cagliari (+18.8%).
The ACI Europe Airport Traffic Report – September 2009 includes 110 airports.
ACI Europe (www.aci-europe.org) is the European region of Airports Council International (ACI), the worldwide professional association of airport operators. ACI Europe represents over 400 airports in 46 European countries. Member airports handle 90% of commercial air traffic in Europe, welcoming more than 1.5 billion passengers each year.
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