Heathrow smashes passenger records despite ‘devastating’ hit from new £10 transit charge
Heathrow Airport has retained its crown as Europe’s busiest airport over the first half of the year as passenger traffic broke records multiple times in July.
Some 8m travellers passed through the West London hub over the month, millions more than the likes of Amsterdam Schiphol, Frankfurt, Madrid and Paris’s Charles de Gaulle.
Heathrow saw six of its busiest ever departure days in the as the school summer holidays kicked off, with over 140,000 direct passengers leaving the airport each day despite disruption from July’s global IT outage and environmental protests.
The airport had never surpassed 1.8m passengers in one week prior to last month, but beat that tally for three weeks straight between eight and 28 July ahead of the Paris Olympic Games.
The most popular destinations over the month were Venice, Lanarca, Dublin, Dubai and New York’s JFK Airport. Heathrow also saw big boosts to Orlando and many other US destinations, including San Francisco and Chicago, as transatlantic travel boomed.
Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye said: “In July, we were smashing a passenger record almost every single day and we’re chasing down our never before seen goal of serving 8m passengers in a single month.
“I’m proud that although there were a few potential challenges which could have caused us to stumble, our team remained focused on the prize of making every journey better and delivered a medal-winning start to the summer getaway.”
The record-breaking figures come despite thousands of flights being cancelled worldwide after a major global IT outage in July.
At the same time, Heathrow has been grappling with new Home Office red tape introduced for some nationalities travelling via connecting flights, which make up a significant proportion of the hub’s traffic.
The so-called Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) means visa-exempt passengers arriving in Britain from certain nationalities will now need to pay £10 and wait around three days for an online permit. It was first brought in for Qatari nationals in November and has since been rolled out to Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
In a statement to shareholders on Monday, Heathrow warned 90,000 transfer passengers had been lost since its introduction in 2023.
“This is devastating for our hub competitiveness. We urge government to review the inclusion of airside transit passengers, every little bit of extra competitiveness that government can deliver for aviation will help deliver vital growth for the whole of the UK economy.”