More long-haul passengers in February
For many Danes, the winter holiday means flying away, and that was certainly evident at Copenhagen Airport, where around 2% more people passed through the airport in February this year than in the same month last year. The long-haul intercontinental routes showed most growth.
In February, the shortest month of the year, 1,983,286 people passed through Copenhagen Airport, 37,744 more than in the same month last year. This represents year-on-year growth of 1.9%, with European traffic up 1.7% and intercontinental traffic up 6.7%, continuing the strong positive trend for long-haul routes:
“The long-haul routes are important and the continuing high growth emphasises that there is a big demand for direct air routes to destinations outside Europe,” says Copenhagen Airport’s CEO Thomas Woldbye. “In recent years, we’ve succeeded in attracting a number of new long-haul routes to Copenhagen Airport, and at the turn of the year we had direct routes to 36 non-European destinations, with the network of routes to North America having been especially strengthened. This means, for example, that it’s become much easier for American tourists to come to Copenhagen, while Danish companies now have greater direct access to important markets. The expansion of Copenhagen Airport to be able to handle 40 million passengers a year is largely a matter of creating capacity for even more long-haul routes.”
Thomas Woldbye stresses that many airlines will be opening new routes in connection with this year’s summer programme, with a large number of those routes scheduled to start up in March:
“Norwegian will be opening its route to Oakland near San Francisco, while SAS will be opening routes to the Faroes, Riga, Malta and Sardinia. Wizz Air will be opening a route to Kiev, and Ryanair, Blue Air, Air France and Nextjet will be opening routes to other interesting destinations. This clearly demonstrates that there is still huge interest in flying to and from Copenhagen,” says Thomas Woldbye.
February 2017 was one day shorter than February 2016, meaning that traffic growth per day was 5.6% compared with last year. London was the most popular destination in February with 196,379 passengers, while Munich had the highest growth rate, 18.4%, among the top 10 largest destinations. So far this year, 3.7% more people have travelled through Copenhagen Airport compared with the same period in 2016.
