Busy public holiday weekends at Copenhagen Airport
The Great Prayer Day and Ascension Day public holidays are reflected in the traffic figures for May, which saw record passenger numbers of just under 2.6 million, boosted by continuing growth in long-haul routes. Meanwhile, building and expansion work at the airport is ongoing.
Copenhagen Airport continues to show passenger growth. So far this year, 11.2 million passengers have passed through the airport, representing total growth of 2.7%.
In May, the number of passengers increased by 1.3% compared to the same very busy month last year. In total, there were 2,594,083 passengers. The long weekends around the Ascension Day and Great Prayer Day public holidays were especially busy.
“Traditionally, it’s a little bit busier when Danes have the time to travel over a long weekend,” says Copenhagen Airport’s CEO, Thomas Woldbye. “This year, many of them also decided to take some extra days off and fly farther on holiday. We can see that the number of travellers on the long-haul intercontinental routes has increased by 10.9% compared to May last year.”
It is the intercontinental traffic to destinations outside Europe that is accounting for much of the growth. So far this year, intercontinental traffic has grown by 7.8% to 1,280,472 passengers.
That growth looks set to continue. On 30 May, Air India announced that it will be starting up a route between Delhi and Copenhagen on 16 September with three weekly departures. That will give Copenhagen Airport 35 direct intercontinental routes.
“The increasing desire to travel and the growth in passenger numbers are the reasons why, over a number of years, we’re expanding the airport at a cost of around DKK 1.3 billion a year,” says Thomas Woldbye.
At the present time, the central security checkpoint is being expanded to twice its current size, Terminal 2 and Terminal 3 are being renovated and significantly expanded before the security checkpoint, and Terminal 2 is to be expanded to twice its size after the security checkpoint. Furthermore, the airport is in the process of building more stands for aircraft as well as a brand-new Pier E chiefly for large intercontinental aircraft.
