Summer is the peak season at Copenhagen Airport with our terminals teeming with holiday-bound travellers. A total of 2.95 million passengers travelled through the airport in August, an increase of 360,000 on August 2023. That brings the total number of passengers for the three summer months of June, July and August to nine million.
“Despite a drop in the number of passenger flights to and from Copenhagen Airport, we had an excellent summer that was fully on a par with 2018 and 2019, our busiest summers to date. This is because more airlines now use more modern aircraft that accommodate more passengers and because the airlines are now better at filling the aircraft,” says Peter Krogsgaard, Chief Commercial Officer of Copenhagen Airports A/S.
A total of 22,153 passenger aircraft took off and landed at Copenhagen Airport in August, compared with 23,261 in August 2019. This corresponds to a five per cent reduction in the number of flights in August, while the number of passengers passing through the airport remained the same. The load factor, or the average number of seats filled from Copenhagen, was as much as 81.0 per cent in August compared with 79.0 per cent in 2019.
Summer in Europe
The European routes to and from Copenhagen saw strong growth. In the three summer months, the number of passengers travelling to European destinations was up 12 per cent on last summer, mainly driven by the three largest airlines at Copenhagen Airport: SAS, Norwegian and Ryanair.
“We saw a marked increase in the number of passengers on the European routes. Because flights to and from our 128 European destinations make up 85 per cent of our total traffic, it has a great impact on us when Europe is on a growth path. The passengers are Danes bound for sunny destinations in southern Europe, but we also see a growing number of southern European tourists visiting Denmark and Copenhagen,” says Peter Krogsgaard.
With 716,000 passengers, Spanish destinations ranked top by some margin among the most popular countries of destination in southern Europe, followed by Italy, Greece, France and Turkey.
The routes to and from Italy saw the strongest growth in the number of passengers. Some 609,000 passengers travelled between Copenhagen and Italian airports during the three summer months, a year-on-year increase of 35 per cent.
More transfer passengers in Copenhagen
The total increase in passenger numbers over the summer was also driven by a growing number of transfer passengers travelling via Copenhagen, using the airport as a stopover on their journey to destinations around the world.
The number of transfer passengers in the three summer months grew by 19 per cent on the year-earlier period. The vast majority of transfer passengers at Copenhagen Airport fly in from airports in northern Europe, especially from Sweden and Norway and other Danish airports.
“We are very pleased with the increase in the number of transfer passengers. It strengthens our position as a key traffic hub, and it shows that many travellers see us as an attractive airport with a comprehensive route network to many parts of the world,” Peter Krogsgaard explains.
This year – so far – more than 3.7 million transfer journeys have been made to and out of Copenhagen Airport. SAS, which is the largest airline at Copenhagen Airport, accounts for the vast majority of transfer passengers – approximately 80 per cent.