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In the sixth month of the year, more than 1.5 million passengers passed through Budapest Airport, breaking the all-time record set in June, writes Világgazdaság. The airport’s total traffic for the first six months of the year reached 7.9 million passengers, surpassing the record year before the COVID pandemic by almost 7 percent.
Budapest Airport expects 2024 to be another record year, meaning that this year’s passenger numbers could even exceed the pre-pandemic levels. 41 airlines serve the post- pandemic travel demand from Budapest, offering 134 destinations on the summer schedule.
New destinations this year include:
but new airlines have also added new routes to the palette, offering excellent connections to previously less accessible destinations in the Far East and even Australia and New Zealand. These include China Southern Airline’s Cantonese flights and Shanghai Airlines’ flights to Xi’an, which have been added to the range of Chinese flights since the end of June, and will soon be joined by Hainan Airlines’ Shenzhen-Budapest service.
The city of Shenzhen. Photo: Pixabay
In addition to the new routes on the schedule,
passenger favorites continue to hold their place in the ranking of destinations, with London, Milan and Istanbul being the most popular cities during the half-year, and the UK, Italy and Spain topping the country rankings.
Airlines offered 66 percent more seats to Spain and Italy in the first half of this year than in 2019.
Similar to passenger traffic, Budapest Airport could also break another record in terms of the volume of cargo handled at the end of this year. In June, cargo volumes reached 25,001 tons – 57.5 percent more than in June 2023 and surpassing March, which was the strongest month ever for cargo. In the first half of 2024, a total of 133,747 tons of cargo was handled at Budapest Airport, 46.2 percent more than in the same period last year.
This result is due to Hungary’s strategic location, and Budapest Airport’s exceptional cargo infrastructure.
Budapest Airport has seen a steady and impressive increase in traffic. It is already approaching record levels and will soon exceed them, also boosting revenues. This means that after the HUF 30 billion (EUR 75.7 million) in 2022, in the future it could bring the Hungarian state an order of magnitude higher annual profit, emphasized Csaba Dömötör, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister, on his Facebook page.
The politician also added that in addition to profits, the domestically owned company has previously provided loans to its owners, and the interest on these loans will now also generate revenue for the owner, the Hungarian state. The size of this is almost equal to the dividend. Taken together, the two sources of income are conservatively expected to amount to HUF 60-80 billion (EUR 151-202 million) a year, which could be significantly increased in the future with successful airport management, the State Secretary pointed out.
Via Világgazdaság; Featured image via Facebook/Budapest Airport