Copenhagen Airport among world’s best at developing new air routes

For the fourth year in a row, Copenhagen Airport has been ranked among the world’s best at route development. The honour came in Chengdu, China, at the world’s largest aviation conference, World Routes, where airlines from around the world chose CPH as one of the world’s best airports for route development in the category of airports with 20 to 50 million passengers.

The Danish team of route developers was presented with the award here this afternoon (CET). Morten Mortensen, director of airline sales and route development, stresses that the award for CPH’s route development work is important:

“Every single air route creates connectivity, growth and jobs in Denmark. Good cooperation with the airlines is vital in this, and it is the airlines who have once again ranked us among the world’s elite when it comes to route development.”

All air routes create growth
Among other things, the panel of judges was struck by the significant growth at Copenhagen Airport. In the first six months of the year alone, 13.7 million passengers passed through the airport, an increase of 11%.

Looking further back, in the period 2005-2015 Copenhagen Airport added around DKK 31 billion to Denmark’s gross domestic product and created the platform for thousands of new jobs.

Between 2005 and 2015, Copenhagen Airport attracted 56 new routes. Together with increased traffic on existing routes, this strengthened the airport’s contribution to Denmark’s international connectivity by more than 50% measured using theconnectivity index of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). This emerges from a study by DAMVAD Analytics.

Morten Mortensen stresses that the many new routes have given Danes and Danish companies direct access to new destinations such as Toronto, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Dubai that were not previously reachable via direct air routes from Copenhagen.

“At the same time, Denmark has also moved up the list of interesting travel destinations for large numbers of people as we have opened up new air routes. In the first quarter of the year alone, the number of tourists flying into Copenhagen Airport increased by more than 27% compared to the same quarter last year,” says Mortensen.

Airlines behind the award
The team of route developers is extremely proud of the award:

“This is recognition for the great cooperation that we have with the airlines and a clear indication that our analyses, route data and proposals for developing new and existing routes are extremely useful for the companies,” says Mortensen.

The 22nd World Route Development Forum is being held in Chengdu, where 3,000 representatives of 300 airlines, 700 airports and 130 tourism organisations have come together to discuss and negotiate route development.