Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) saw solid traffic growth in April, handling 5.4m passengers, 362,000 tonnes of cargo, and 32,700 flight movements. These figures represent year-on-year increases of +9.5%, +6.0% and +7.0% respectively.

 

The rise in passenger traffic was mainly due to a big +30% year-on-year growth in Hong Kong resident usage with routes to/from Taiwan, Mainland China and Japan recording the most biggest increases.

 

Stanley Hui Hon-chung, CEO of Airport Authority Hong Kong, says: “If we combine the traffic figures for March and April to even out the effects of the Easter holidays, we see strong year-on-year increases in passenger volume (+6.2%), cargo tonnage (+8.2%) and flight movements (+6.6%). These figures support our expectations that 2014 will be a solid year for HKIA, in line with the global economic recovery.”

 

With traffic volumes rising so fast, HKIA is looking at how it can maintain operational efficiencies. The airport has introduced self-service technologies such as self check-in kiosks and mobile boarding pass services, and also started to explore self-service baggage drop-off for checked-in passengers., as Singapore Changi is currently doing.

 

For the first four months of 2014, HKIA handled 20.4m passengers, registering year-on-year growth of +6.4%, and on a rolling 12-month basis, passenger volume grew +6.8% to 61.1m.