Renta 4 | Passenger traffic figures for 2023 have shown an excellent performance, mainly in the last quarter of the year, when they have comfortably exceeded the figures reached before the pandemic. The rest of the year the figures were slightly above 2019 (the exception was June where they were slightly below the pre-pandemic traffic). Overall, there was a growth of +16.2% compared to 2022, reaching a 2.9% higher traffic than in 2019, reaching 283.2 million passengers (vs. 275.2 million passengers in 2019).
The eight main airports, which account for 76% of total traffic, have shown growth of between 9% and 23%, with Barajas (21.2% of total traffic) growing by almost 19%, and El Prat (17.6% of total traffic) increasing passengers by almost 20%, both figures with respect to 2022. If we look at the geographical breakdown of traffic, we can see that most of this good performance compared to 2019 is explained by the excellent tone of domestic traffic (32.8% of the total), which shows a growth of 8.4% compared to 2019 statistics (+12.6% vs. 2022), while international traffic (67.2% of the total) remains largely unchanged year-on-year, growing only +0.5% vs. 2019 (+18.2% vs. 2022), we estimate that this is due to the fact that Asian traffic, mainly from China, remains weak, and that part of business flights, as we have seen in other more international airports not so favoured by the good tone of the tourism sector, has not yet reached the pre-pandemic figures.
On a monthly basis, December has been the month with the best passenger traffic performance vs 2019, exceeding these statistics by 10.6%, specifically reaching 20.2 million passengers, +12.8% vs. 2022.
The number of flights in 2023 exceeded 2022 levels by 8.5% (December accelerated to +11.3% vs. 2022), with cargo volume exceeding by 7.9% (December accelerated to +17.3% vs. 2022) enabling an all-time record in the volume of goods transported.
