BUD Airport broke record again

According to turizmusonline.hu, thanks to the dynamically increasing traffic, over one million people travelled to or from Ferihegy Airport. This number is without precedent and shows the growing popularity of BUD Airport.

Passenger traffic increased by more than 14 per cent on Budapest Airport. 1,025,501 passengers visited the airport in November only.

Passenger traffic in November has never reached 1 million before on Liszt Ferenc International Airport, Budapest. Since, from the middle of December, the Christmas and New Year’s traffic will start, it is predictable that traffic this year will draw near to, or even exceed 13 million, which is way more than last year’s record, 11.4 million.

The dynamic increase in traffic will not stop in the winter either, although a natural decline is predicted for January and February, 2018, just like every year. Still, it is visible that the airport’s performance has been more and more balanced in the last couple of years.

Some of the contributing factors are the 14 new flights started in the winter schedule and the increase of capacity and number of flights on existing routes.

In this year’s winter season, new flights were started to sunny destinations such as the Canary Islands or Morocco. Wizz Air and Ryanair both offer new flights to these destinations at affordable prices. From December, the Spanish Iberia will return to Budapest with its flight to Madrid in the winter season as well.

“We are very proud of the increase of traffic, which is the success of both Hungarian economy and tourism. Budapest is attractive for tourists and business travellers alike. The number of grey areas in Europe is declining, there are hardly any big cities that are not connected with Budapest. We are concentrating on more Asian connections from next summer on besides the transatlantic flights that are being launched in 2018” – said Jost Lammers, chief executive of Budapest Airport.

An especially important aspect is that

the increase of traffic does not cause the increase of environmental load for those living near the airport.

The number of taking offs and landing has not grown as quickly as the number of passengers has.

In practice, this means that airlines are attempting to fly with a bigger capacity utilisation, or use airplanes with bigger capacities. To compare: in 2007, 126 thousand taking offs and landings were recorded on Ferihegy, this number will probably reach 100 thousand this year, after a long break. Moreover, during the last years the number of more silent and more environmentally friendly airplanes has increased at airlines travelling to Budapest.

In order to satisfy the needs of the fast growing passenger traffic, Budapest Airport launched its programme called BUD 2020 two years ago. It is a five-year airport development program of 160 million euro value. As part of this, runway number one was renovated, new and more advanced instrumentation delivery equipment (ILS) have been installed, the airport hotel will open shortly, and in the next year they will hand over the passenger compartment on the B-side, which handles non-Schengen traffic and will increase the passenger area by 10,000 square metres.

Source: turizmusonline.hu