5.1 million passengers were counted between July and September – double the number of the previous year. At the airport, there is hope that the trend will continue.
Munich Airport is on the up: As the company announced on Thursday, the airport recorded its largest increase since the beginning of the corona pandemic in the third quarter. Between July and September more than 5.1 million passengers were counted – a doubling of the number compared to the previous year. Most of the passengers started from Erdinger Moos in September, 1.9 million people were counted. This means that the airport recorded almost as many passengers this month as in the entire first half of 2021, according to Flughafen München GmbH.
In the first six months there were a total of 2.2 million travelers. Despite the recovery, there is still a big difference from pre-corona summers. In August 2019 alone there were around four million passengers, and in September 2021 it was only 40 percent of the volume compared to September 2019, according to Flughafen GmbH.
At the airport, it is hoped that the upward trend will continue. “The volume of traffic in Munich is now at a significantly higher level than last year. All the signals point to a further recovery in air traffic,” said Jost Lammers, CEO of Flughafen München GmbH, optimistically. Passengers also increasingly used the Franz-Josef-Strauss-Airport to change trains. While only about one in five passengers changed trains in May (more precisely: 21 percent), it was recently almost twice as many, namely 38 percent.
The opening of the USA should also contribute to the further increase in the number of passengers: from November onwards, fully vaccinated tourists from the European Union will be allowed to fly back to the United States – after being banned from entering the country for more than one and a half years. Lufthansa now wants to increase the number of its weekly connections to New York to ten, and Los Angeles will then be served seven times a week. Other North American destinations will also be served from November: Miami, Mexico City, Montreal and, for the first time in the winter flight schedule, Vancouver.