Record passengers travel through Finnish airports

Record number of passengers have travelled through the airports in Finland in the first six months of this year.

Finavia, the company operates air traffic and airports in the country said that a total of 10,958,075 passengers travelled through the airports so far this year.

The number is 7.9% higher compared to the number of passengers during the stipulated period in 2016, said a press release.

“International passenger volumes at our airports grew by more than 10% between January and June, with a growth of around 2% in the number of domestic passengers. The growth continued to accelerate further in the second quarter in comparison to the first. The developments we are seeing are mainly due to the rising number of Asian and other international passengers travelling through our airport,” said the Chief Executive Officer of Finavia Kari Savolainen.

In the second quarter, the number of international passengers reached around 4.4 million. About 3.2 million of these passengers remained in Finland while around 1.3 million transfer passengers travelled onward to other destinations.

Helsinki Airport, the largest of Finavia’s 21 airports, recorded a total of 9,034,244 passengers in the first quarter of 2017. This represents 8.6% growth year-on-year. The passenger numbers in both the first and second quarter exceed the previous year’s performance.

In fact, the first half of 2017 was the busiest ever at Helsinki Airport.

At Helsinki Airport, the rapid growth in the number of passengers from Asia, up by 12.8% compared to H1 2016, is among other things due to additional flights from Japan and Hong Kong and the overall rise in the number of international transfer passengers.

The number of passengers connecting on to another international flight at Helsinki Airport grew by a staggering 23.3% when compared with Q2 2016. The success is above all due to Helsinki Airport’s status as the best globally-connected airport in Northern Europe.

In the second quarter, passenger numbers at Helsinki Airport were up by 10.8% compared with the same period in the previous year.

At Finland’s second largest airport in Oulu, passenger volume was down 16.6% due to a runway refurbishment.

This allowed Kemi-Tornio Airport in Lapland to increase traffic by 78.1%. In Lapland, Kittilä Airport also achieved a more than 70% year-on-year increase in passenger volumes in the second quarter of 2017.