The Full Year 2025 Airport Traffic Report released today by ACI EUROPE confirms the remarkable resilience of air passenger traffic amidst generally lacklustre European economies, inflated airfares, significant supply and capacity pressures, as well as ever volatile and tense geopolitics.

Passenger traffic across the European airport network in 2025 increased by +4.4% when compared to the preceding year – marking a return to “normalised” growth patterns after the bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in Europe’s airports welcoming an additional 100 million passengers and setting a new absolute record of 2.6 billion passengers.

Passenger traffic remained on a positive trajectory throughout 2025 with the growth dynamic accelerating in the 4^th Quarter at +6.1% – a positive signal for 2026.

The growth was entirely driven by international passenger traffic which expanded by +5.6%, whereas domestic passenger traffic remained flat at +0.2%.

Non-EU+ airports outperformed the European average, with their passenger volumes expanding by +6.2% compared to +4% at EU+ airports. This is due primarily to the relative maturity of the EU+ market and the much lower propensity to fly in non-EU+ markets.

While many European airports broke their passenger traffic records, 41% of them finished the year still below their pre-pandemic (2019) levels as traffic performance variations remained a reality. This reflects increased traffic volatility, airline dominance and consolidation along with renewed competitive pressures upon airports.

The integral version of the report (five pages) is attached to this AVIONEWS.