January Airport Traffic in Greece Beats 2022 and 2019 Levels

Athens International Airport (AIA). Photo © Greek Travel Pages (GTP)

Airport traffic through Greece’s airports in January this year surpassed both 2022 and pre-Covid 2019 levels for the same month, the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority (HCAA) announced this week.

More specifically, Athens International Airport (AIA), the 24 airports run by the HCAA and the country’s 14 regional airports managed by Fraport Greece handled a total of 2,202,735 passengers (arrivals and departures) in January 2023 compared to 1,249,387 in January 2022 and 2,135,674 in 2019, marking a 76.3 percent rise over last year and a 3.1 percent increase against 2019.

Flight activity through Greece’s airports was also up by 21.7 percent in January 2023 compared to the same month in 2022 to 22,176 flights from 18,218. The number of flights was however still down by 0.2 percent over 2019 and 22,219 flights.

Meanwhile, Greece’s 14 regional airports reported a 60.6 percent rise in traffic in January over the same month in 2022 but the figure was still down by 3.6 percent over 2019, Fraport Greece said.

Source: Fraport Greece

More specifically, over 596,000 travelers went through Greece’s 14 regional airports compared to over 618,000 in 2019.

Flight figures were down by 7 percent in the first month of the year compared to 2019.

Source: Fraport Greece

According to Fraport data, international traffic in January increased by 79 percent and domestic traffic by 51.5 percent over 2022 setting the pace for the year ahead.

Santorini airport marked the largest increase in traffic by 82.6 percent over 2022 and by 13.1 percent in terms of flights.

The country’s 14 regional airports which include those on Mykonos, Santorini, Corfu, and Skiathos, welcomed travelers mostly from Germany, Cyprus, Italy, the UK and Austria in January.

In Athens, the country’s main airport AIA welcomed a total of 1.45 million passengers in the first month of year, marking an 87.2 percent increase compared to January 2022 and up by 3.9 percent compared to 1.39 million in the pre-pandemic period.