The strong growth trend of international passenger traffic at Finavia’s Finnish airports – and Helsinki in particular – is continuing, with traffic up +12.7% to four million in the third quarter.

 

This compares with +9.4% overall growth across all 21 airports amounting to 16.8m passengers between January and September.

 

Joni Sundelin, Senior Vice President, Director of Airport Networks and Sales said: “Our passenger volumes continue to grow due to general positive development in the economy, Finnair’s strong growth – especially in their Asian air traffic – improved passenger load factors, and Finland’s growing attraction as a travel destination.

 

IMPRESSIVE ASIAN ROUTE GROWTH AT HELSINKI…

“We also work tirelessly on acquiring new routes and airlines to our airports. Over the past year, we have gained new clients to the Helsinki Airport, including Qatar Airways, Transavia, Blue Air and Croatia Airlines. In addition, the Chinese airline Lucky Air will start operating in January.”

 

 

JAPAN AND CHINA CONTINUE TO BE HUGE TARGETS

The importance of Helsinki Airport cannot be over emphasised. Finavia says that in the third quarter no less than 88% of its total passengers passed through Helsinki Airport, which handled 5.2m in the third quarter – a 10.7% year-on-year growth.

 

Significantly, third quarter international passenger numbers within Europe grew by +11.2% compared with the same quarter period last year, while other destinations saw even more impressive growth of +21.0%. Finavia said the ‘most significant destinations in Europe’ were Germany, Sweden and Spain followed by Japan and China in Asia.

 

Sundelin said: “Summer is the busiest time of the year in European air travel. For example, passenger volumes between Helsinki and Amsterdam were up by 27% compared with the same period last year.

 

 

HELSINKI’S TRANSFER BUSINESS IS VERY IMPORTANT

“This positive development has been facilitated by Norwegian’s and Transavia’s new operations, for instance. In addition, Tampere airport has seen a remarkable change in international passenger volumes – plus-30.7% compared with Q3 2016 – one of the reasons being the opening of Air Baltic’s route to Riga.”.

 

Of the aforementioned 4.8m international passengers in Q3, Finavia says more than 660,000 were transfers, representing a +25.5% rise on the same period last year. While 83% of the quarter’s traffic was European, Asian traffic also accounted for a growing 10% share of total traffic.

 

Sundelin added: “Air travel is increasing in popularity, not only in Europe, but also elsewhere. We can see this especially well in the growing international transfer passenger volumes at Helsinki Airport.

 

“We have continuously broken records from quarter to quarter this year. For example, the growth of our Asian passenger volumes by 20% is due to both Finnair’s more frequent flights to Hong Kong [+46.1% compared with Q3 2016] and Tokyo [Japan +19.7 compared with Q3 2016], and to larger planes used by the airlines, along with their improved passenger load factors,”