Frankfurt Airport (FRA) has served more than 70.5 million passengers in 2019 – achieving a new all-time record by exceeding the 70-million mark for the first time in a calendar year. Compared to the previous year, this represents a passenger increase of 1.5%. Following a positive trend in the first half of 2019 (up 3.0%), passenger volumes largely stagnated in the second half of the year (up 0.2%). In the months of November and December 2019, passenger numbers declined for the first time since November 2016. The relatively weaker growth in full-year passenger numbers can be mainly attributed to domestic traffic (down 3.4%) and European traffic (up 1.2%). In contrast, intercontinental traffic to and from FRA increased by 3.4% in 2019.
The airports in Fraport AG’s international portfolio continued to show largely positive performance during 2019. Affected by the bankruptcy of home-carrier Adria Airways and other factors, Ljubljana Airport (LJU) in Slovenia recorded a 5.0% traffic decline in the reporting year (December 2019: down 21.6%). In contrast, Fraport’s two Brazilian airports of Fortaleza (FOR) and Porto Alegre (POA) posted combined traffic growth of 3.9% to 15.5 million passengers (December 2019: up 0.3%). Peru’s Lima Airport (LIM) continued the strong performance of previous years, with traffic rising by 6.6% (December 2019: up 5.4%).
Traffic at the 14 Greek regional airports expanded slightly by 0.9% to nearly 30.2 million passengers in 2019 (December 2019: down 2.2%). Following years of dynamic growth, traffic at Varna (VAR) and Burgas (BOJ) airports in Bulgaria declined by 10.7%, due to airlines consolidating their flight offerings (December 2019: up 23.3%).
In 2019, traffic at Turkey’s Antalya Airport (AYT) once again advanced rapidly by 10.0% to almost 35.5 million passengers (December 2019: up 2.8 %). Pulkovo Airport (LED) in St. Petersburg, Russia, saw traffic climb by 8.1% to some 19.6 million passengers (December 2019: up 5.7%). At Xi’an Airport (XIY) in China, traffic jumped by 5.7 percent to more than 47.2 million passengers (December 2019: up 4.7%).
