Air Travel in Ireland took 34 months to return to pre-pandemic passenger numbers, the Central Statistics Office has concluded in its assessment of the COVID-19 Impact on Employment, Earnings, and Air Travel.
April 2020 saw just over 25,000 passengers at five main airports in Ireland. This figure was 99.2pc lower than the 3.3m passengers in April 2019.
By April 2024, 3,380,921 passengers were handled by those same airports. While the recovery to pre-pandemic passenger numbers at Irish airports took 34 months, Ryanair passenger numbers have returned to 129.4pc of pre-pandemic levels and Aer Lingus 94.8pc.
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The first major downturn began in March 2020, with a 58pc drop in traveller numbers at major Irish airports.
Damien Lenihan, Statistician in Transport Division, shared: “Restrictions on travel introduced as a result of the pandemic had a dramatic and immediate impact on passenger numbers at the country’s five main airports, Dublin, Cork, Shannon, Knock, and Kerry.
By March 2020, the number of passengers handled by the five main airports had fallen by 58pc, and by April 2020, just 25,286 passengers passed through these airports, which was 99.2pc lower than the 3,232,744 passengers handled by these airports in April 2019. Figure 4, which charts the monthly number of passengers handled by all main airports in Ireland from 2019 to November 2024, shows passenger numbers were affected for about two and half years.
Following the initial fall in March and April 2020 and the subsequent rise in passenger numbers from May of that year, the number of passengers handled by the five main airports contracted once more from the beginning of 2021. There were 98,127 passengers handled in February 2021, which was a reduction of 95.8pc on February 2020 (See Table TAM08 – Passengers handled by main airports).
When looking at the monthly figures for 2021, only about one in ten (11.1pc) of total passengers used these airports in first six months of the year, compared with 47.1pc of total passengers handled in 2019 during the first six months.
It was August 2022 before a single month achieved 90pc of its pre-pandemic passenger handling figure (4,018,066 in August 2019 compared with 3,608,290 in August 2022), and January 2023 before a single month surpassed its pre-pandemic levels (2,417,073 in January 2023 compared with 2,388,377 in January 2020). The most recent Aviation Statistics for Quarter 4 and Year 2023 show that more than 39.2m people used the five main airports in 2023, which was the highest number of passengers recorded since the series began in 2013.”
