Copenhagen Airport has also presented its figures for the year 2021 and it appears that Scandinavia’s largest airport during the year was Oslo Gardemoen Airport. Copenhagen Airport lands just under 200,000 fewer passengers than Oslo Gardermoen, which had 9.4 million passengers during the year 2021.
There were 9,179,654 passengers through the terminals of Copenhagen Airport in 2021 – a growth of 22 percent compared to 2020 when the corona pandemic hit in March. However, the year was still 70 percent below the 2019 level.
2021 became like night and day. It started with parked planes, empty terminals, and just 5,000 passengers a day, equivalent to a regular travel day in 1962.
“After an unusually quiet winter and spring, Europe reopened and the restrictions were lifted. In just a few months, the number of travelers more than quadrupled from 260,000 in May to 1.2 million in July. This shows that the desire to travel is intact, and it bodes well for 2022, ”says Peter Krogsgaard, commercial director at Copenhagen Airport.
“In December, despite the omikron variant, we reached just under 1.1 million passengers – a nice end to a year in which the summer and autumn holidays, in particular, redeemed the saved need to fly out into the world for holidays and business,” says Peter Krogsgaard.
On the monthly top lists of destinations in 2021, there was one country in particular that stood out: Spain. Here, Malaga and Mallorca became two of the major destinations until the winter when Gran Canaria entered the top-10 list in December.
Thus, Spain became the absolute most visited country of the year with 1.1 million travelers. Also other classic holiday countries such as. Italy, Greece, and Turkey had many passengers – with 450,000, 410,000, and almost 370,000 passengers respectively.
As domestic traffic has been far less affected than foreign traffic, Aalborg ended up as the biggest destination of the year with 566,393 passengers.
While most of Europe opened around the summer holidays, the US and Asia remained more or less closed countries for travelers until November. This meant that the number of passengers on the long, intercontinental routes landed at almost 18 percent of the level from 2019:
“At the end of the year, the long journeys out of Europe to Thailand and American cities like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago began again. In December, we were at almost 50 percent of the normal passenger numbers on intercontinental traffic. It creates extra optimism, ”says Peter Krogsgaard.
“When we get through this winter – and if we avoid several surprising COVID-19 variants – we can very well see traffic in Europe begin to return to normal during the summer,” says Peter Krogsgaard.
