Portuguese airports see highest numbers of passengers on record

Even without taking in to account the traditionally stronger summer months, there were already two million more passengers passing through Portugal’s airports than in the first half of 2018. Porto was the fastest growing airport, but Lisbon still receives more than half of the flight travel traffic.

Between the summer months and the Christmas holidays, the second half of the year is traditionally more profitable for the tourism industry, and at airports across the country it is the busiest period. This is further increased by the new routes and flight frequencies launched by TAP.

Even just looking at the numbers up to July, Spain revealed a new record yesterday, with more than 29 million people passing through its airports in July alone (+ 3.4%). This shows an increased amount of interest in travel to the Iberian Peninsula as a whole. Here in Portugal, reality is adapted to the smaller size of the country, but in June (data from Airports Council International) traffic at Humberto Delgado Airport grew 9.7% compared to the same month last year, which contrasts with the average of European airports in the same period, which stood at 4.7%.

Even with only the first six months on record, successive records estimate that 2019 will be best year on record. Not to mention that we are still only half way through period that represents the most significant share of passenger influx, and despite the limitations of a diminished infrastructure in Lisbon, the average growth rate of Portuguese airports is just over 7.2%, almost double the European average (4.3%).

In the first half of this year, two million more passengers moved through Portuguese airports in comparison to the numbers registered in the first six months of last year, totalling more than 27.5 million people this year so far

Lisbon Airport, which last year represented the largest growth among the Portuguese infrastructure managed by Vinci (+ 9%) still accounts for more than half of this traffic, with around 15 million passengers in six months. In Porto, traffic grew 10% in the first half of 2019, surpassing six million people.

“These good results reflect, in particular, the opening of several air links with different world capitals,” explained those behind the semester results analysis, giving examples of the launch of TAP flights to Washington and the first direct link between Lisbon and Doha in June as factors that helped “passenger numbers increase by 7.8% in the second quarter” at Vinci airports in Portugal. This also included Faro (close to four million passengers in this period), Madeira (1, 6 million) and Azores (1.09 million). “The development of new routes is essential to Vinci’s value creation project,” summarizes Nicolas Notebaert, president of Vinci.