The Netherlands largest and busiest airport, Amsterdam Schiphol has released its traffic and transport figures for March 2023.
Overall the airport has reported very good stats for the 3rd month of the year, with nearly 4.6 million travellers passing through the airport.
To be exact, it was 4,585,101 passengers, which represents a 23% increase over 2022 and a staggering 594% increase over 2021.
With this in mind it clearly shows the airport is recovering very well from the pandemic, however the airport isn’t quite at its 2019 levels yet.
In March 2019, the airport handled 5,637,767 passengers, so with enough luck, this could be achieved by March 2024.
As for flight movements, the airport handled 33,128 flights, up from 30,382 flights in March 2022.
This too shows recovery in this area, however with passenger caps being in place at the moment, this recovery is being halted slightly.
The number of cargo flights for this previous month was 1,446 cargo movements recorded.
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Interestingly this figure is down from 1,688 in March 2022, but this likely due to a decrease in cargo demand, coming out of the pandemic.
This figure connects well to the amount of cargo transported through the airport, which also saw a decrease down to 121,746 tonnes from 128,198 tonnes.
Breaking down the figures further
Amsterdam Schiphol reports that of the 4.6million passengers that flew in/out of the airport, 1.8million of them were transfer passengers.
These were the passengers using the airport as a connecting airport, but what is interesting to note is Schiphol counts each connecting passenger twice, due to the international counting method.
This means that in reality only 900,000 passengers transferred through the airport, but it is marked as 1.8million, because they arrived and departed.
Of the 4.6 million passengers, a staggering 3.1 million flew to or from a European destination, with 1.5 million travelling outside of Europe.
Popular destinations
Amsterdam collated the data of most popular destinations from Schiphol in a top 10 as follows:
- London
- Istanbul
- Barcelona
- Dublin
- Madrid
- Milan
- Copenhagen
- Dubai
- Manchester
- Lisbon
In addition, the airport also compiled, the top 3 European countries from the AMS, which were the UK, Spain and Italy. As for most popular international destination, the U.S made the top spot.
As mentioned with flights, the airport saw 33,128 passenger aircraft movements in March 2023. Of these flights 26,326 of them were European flights and 6,802 were intercontinental flights.
Moving to cargo, we mentioned that Schiphol reported a decrease in cargo flights from 1,688 to 1,446. This is also the same for the amount of cargo transported as well, which we mentioned earlier.
Overall, the airport reported that most of the cargo was transported to and from Asia, followed by North and South America and finally the Middle East.
Recovery still needed
All in all Amsterdam has had a strong start to the year with recovery in all areas still continuing.
However, figures are not quite at March 2019 levels yet, so it seems the airport may have to push to March 2024 to reach these levels.
This may be all well and good, but Amsterdam is still tied down by daily passenger caps, which were supposed to end at the end of March 2023, but have now been extended to the end of September 2023.
This means the final step in recovering to 2019 traffic and passenger levels could be proven to be slow if passenger caps still remain in place event to years end. Although only time will tell, with this aspect.
