It’s no secret that air travel demand has been on a continuous rise and on the path to recover its pre pandemic numbers all through 2022. Nonetheless the latest news comes from one of the busiest airports on the planet Dubai International Airport (DXB). Emirates‘ home and hub has just adjusted its passenger forecasts for 2022 ahead of the closing quarter. Let’s look a little closer in the news coming from the the busiest middle-eastern airport.
Dubai Airport DXB’s Q3 at Pre Pandemic Passenger Levels
The great news coming from Dubai International Airport (DXB) is that the airport’s Q3 performance for the first time in the past 2 years reached pre pandemic levels.
In Q3 (July/August/September) the airport averaged out at 6 million passenger transits per month. DXB wrapped up the quarter with the fantastic result of 18.5 million passengers. This figure surpasses the last pre pandemic quarter, 2020 Q1, when Dubai International welcomed 17.8 million passengers.
Projections for 2022 and Q4 Hopes
The hope hope is that the upcoming Christmas festivities will further boost demand. DXB’s management expects the last 3 months of 2022 to bring a significant uplift in passenger numbers.
This pushed the airport to up its forecasted passenger number for 2022 to 64.3 million passengers to transit DXB by December 31st. To date (September 30th) Dubai International Airport has consolidated 46,340,826 passenger transits in 2022. This represents:
- A 167% increase compared to the same period of 2021
- 72% of the airport’s pre pandemic total passenger traffic.
This is a similar figure we have come across in other airports, the latest example is Sydney Airport which in October also reached 75% of its pre covid traffic.
However Cargo Operations Slow Down
The flip side is that cargo operations are down. However this was quite easily forecastable as the rise of passenger traffic meant that earlier in 2022 many of the cargo airlines had to move operations to the more unattractive Dubai World Central Airport (DWC).
