During the six-week summer holidays, a total of 278,501 passengers passed through Dortmund Airport. Of these, around 34,675 passengers travelled to and from Palma de Mallorca. The Balearic island is consequently this year's favourite holiday destination. At around 29,940 passengers, Katowice came in second place. The third most popular destination for the Dortmund travellers was to and from Munich with around 19,785 passengers in total.
Managing Director of the Airport, Udo Mager explains: "In addition to sunny destinations such as Palma de Mallorca, Dortmund Airport serves destinations in Eastern Europe in order to cater to the high demand of ethnic as well as business traffic in particular. The connections to Katowice and Budapest are in high demand all year round, so that holiday-related volatilities do not greatly affect Dortmund Airport. For business travellers, the connections to Munich and London, which are served by Eurowings, Ryanair and easyjet, represent further attractive offerings. With our largest customer, Wizz Air, we offer reliable flight connections to around 20 destinations in Central and Eastern Europe for twelve months a year.“
With 278,501 passengers, the summer holiday business lagged around 5.6% behind expectations. Passenger numbers on the Turkish connections were significantly below last year's levels at around 4,205 passengers. The major factor here are the discontinuation of the Freebird, BoraJet and some Corendon charter flights to Antalya. Europe-wide, airport operators and airlines are confronted with exceptional circumstances that have impacted significantly on passenger numbers, also during the holiday season. Following a strong first quarter with growth of 4 percent, the geopolitical situation resulted in a reticence to travel which has been reflected in lower passenger numbers at Dortmund Airport as well as at more than half of the commercial airports in Germany.
This summer, Dortmund Airport was already able to partially compensate for this loss of passengers caused by fewer flights to Turkey by means of the increased number of Mallorca connections. A total of 17 flights per weeks took off to Mallorca during the summer holidays. This amounts to three more connections per week than last year.
Despite the decline in passenger numbers caused by external influences, the summer holidays coincide with the busiest month of the year. In July 2016, at 185,562 travellers, the passenger numbers in July reached the highest level to date at Dortmund Airport. "Regardless of the reasons for the fall in passenger numbers, the priority is now to initiate targeted countermeasures. Our sales activities are aimed at offering new attractive holiday destinations from the 2017 summer flight schedule onwards. The objective is not only to compensate for the lower 2016 numbers, but also to continue the growth trend of the previous years. The target here remains to exceed the 2-million passenger mark," says Udo Mager.