Passenger traffic at Dubai International Airport rose by 5.7% to 6.5m in April, while the first four months generated a 6.5% increase to 26.1m customers.

 

Dubai Airport management said that Eastern Europe led with the highest growth rate during April, with a ‘surge’ of 74.6%, mainly thanks to flydubai’s new services to Slovakia, Bosnia, Bulgaria and Croatia, as well as Emirates services to Hungary and Transavia’s to Bulgaria.

 

Other high growth regions included North America with a rise of 17.9%, with Emirates increasing its capacity on ‘many destinations’, while starting a new route to Chicago and traffic increasing by 12.6% to the Indian subcontinent. However, ‘political and economic instability’ continued to strongly depress arrivals from Russia and the CIS routes to the tune of -27.6%.

 

Interestingly, the Indian sub-continent outperformed the rest of the regions (+167,652 passengers), followed by the GCC (+92,069), and Western Europe (+65,175).

 

Paul Griffiths, CEO of Dubai Airports said: “Traffic grew steadily in the first four months of the year and the trend looks set to continue throughout the first half, especially with the summer travel peak just round the corner. We are again expecting record traffic levels at Dubai International this summer and again we will be deploying additional resources from the kerb to the boarding gates to ease the flow of passengers through our facility.”

 

 

INCREASED TOTAL AIRCRAFT MOVEMENTS

Meanwhile, total aircraft movements in April amounted to 33,279 in April 2015, climbing 6.5% from 31,234 movements recorded in April last year. In the first four months total aircraft movements rose by 6% to 133,493 from 125,928 in the same period in 2014.

 

The average number of passengers per movement was 206.2 during April, down by 3.3% from April 2014, while the year-to-date (April) average was 206.4 passengers, down by 2% from the same period last year.

 

 

Dubai International recorded freight volumes totalling 204,075 in April, a contraction of 3.6% compared to 211,588 tonnes recorded in April 2014. Year to date cargo totalled 798,771, a contraction of 4.7% compared to 837,837 during the first four months in 2014.

 

Management says this was due to the transfer of all freighter cargo operations to Dubai World Central Airport last year. [These traffic results for DXB in April 2015 have been delayed due to a data validation exercise-Ed].