- Record 27,907,230 pass through Dublin airport in 2016
- 1.2m passengers transfer at Dublin
- North America up by 16pc
Transatlantic traffic was the fastest-growing segment of the market last year at Dublin Airport as traffic to the Middle East and Africa declined.
DAA said in a statement that a record 2.9m passengers travelled between Dublin and North America in 2016, which was a 16pc increase on the previous year. However, passenger traffic to other destinations, mainly the Middle East and Africa, declined by 3pc to 781,000 during the year, which the DAA blamed largely to a reduction in capacity.
Emphasising Dublin’s growing hub status, the number of passengers transferring increased by 23pc last year to a record 1.2m. Dublin Airport was the fifth largest airport in Europe for North American connectivity in 2016 after Heathrow, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. During the peak summer season, the airport had 48 flights per day to and from 11 cities in the United States and five Canadian destinations.
Passenger numbers at Dublin Airport increased by 11pc to a record 27.9m last year – and 2.8m passengers more than the previous record in 2015.
“Dublin Airport had a very strong performance in 2016,” said Dublin Airport Managing Director Vincent Harrison. “We had double-digit growth across all of our largest market segments and welcomed new routes and new airline customers,” he added.
In other figures:
- Short-haul traffic increased by 11pc last year, with almost 24.3m passenger taking short-haul flights to and from Dublin
- Long-haul passenger numbers rose 12pc to more than 3.6m.
- Passenger traffic to and from continental Europe, the airport’s largest market segment, increased by 11pc to a record 14.2m in 2016.
- The number of passengers travelling between Dublin and English destinations also reached record levels in 2016, with traffic increasing by 12pc to 9.9m.
Nineteen new routes were introduced during 2016 and additional capacity was added on 31 existing services through extra flights or the use of larger aircraft. Three new airlines started operations at Dublin last year – Aegean Airlines, Cobalt, and Flyone – while KLM returned to Dublin after 50 years.
