13.01.2009
Passenger record at CPH

Copenhagen Airport reached a passenger record of 21.5 million passengers in 2008. This represents a 0.6% year-on-year increase. The financial crisis and the bankruptcy of Sterling made an impact on performance in the last two months of the year.

As many as 21,530,016 passengers travelled into and out of Copenhagen Airport in 2008, which was yet another record as passenger numbers increased by 0.6% year on year. However, the international financial crisis and the bankruptcy of Sterling in late October meant that the total growth for the year was not as striking as expected.

“We had expected traffic to grow at a rate of between two and four per cent in 2008, but falling passenger numbers during the past few months of the year meant that the growth rate was lower than expected, said Brian Petersen, CEO of Copenhagen Airports A/S, adding:

“In spite of the Sterling’s bankruptcy, we stand well prepared for the future. Airlines such as Norwegian, Transavia, easyJet, SAS and Cimber Sterling have announced that they plan to open more than 250 new weekly frequencies, and the full effect of these initiatives will become visible over the coming months.”

More destinations
The 250 frequencies should be seen in light of the fact that Sterling had 163 frequencies per week during the week before its bankruptcy.

“CPH offers more destinations and frequencies by different airlines than ever before. The keener competition to fill the flights – especially to destinations such as Alicante, Malaga, London, Nice, Rome and Barcelona – and the low oil price benefit passengers, as there are many cheap tickets on offer at the moment,” said Petersen.

International trend
Traffic in December 2008 was down by 9.8% year on year, and Copenhagen Airport is far from being the only major airport seeing dramatic falls in passenger numbers as a result of the international financial crisis.

“We see the same picture of falling passenger numbers throughout Europe, and despite the effect of Sterling’s bankruptcy, we did not lose more passengers than our peer airports, said Petersen.

Increases for the full year
Whereas traffic figures for December alone showed a fall, there were increases in almost all of CPH’s statistics for the full year.

Passenger numbers for 2008 showed a 0.1% increase in international traffic, a 2.1% increase in domestic traffic and a 4.5% increase in charter traffic. The number of operations increased by 2.5% to 264,095 take-offs and landings.

Forecast for 2009
Copenhagen Airport will release its traffic forecast for 2009 as part of the annual report 2008, which will be published on 16 February.