Increased traffic to China and India helped Heathrow to increase passenger numbers to 72.3 million in 2013.
The UK’s hub airport saw rises of 18.9% to China, helped by new routes such as British Airways’ service to Chengdu, and 8.7% to India. Overall traffic to the BRIC countries, which also includes Brazil and Russia, went up by 6.9% year-on-year.
Overall Heathrow traffic went up by 3.4 per cent year-on-year – with underlying growth of 2.3% due to the dip in passengers caused by the Olympics in summer 2012.
European traffic also saw a 4.4 per cent rise which was helped by the integration of Bmi’s former flights into BA’s operations at the airport.
Heathrow’s CEO Colin Matthews used the figures to again push the airport’s case to be allowed to expand – two options for Heathrow’s expansion have been included in the short-list drawn up by the Airports Commission in December.
“Our passenger figures reflect the growing demand for the long-haul destinations only a hub airport can support. Yet Heathrow is full, leaving European hubs to add destinations whilst we look on,” said Matthews.
“We are not against expansion at Gatwick, but greater point-to-point capacity is no substitute for new hub capacity which only Heathrow can provide.”
Meanwhile Gatwick saw passenger traffic grow by 3.6% to 35.4 million in 2013, compared to 34.2 million in the previous year.
Nick Dunn, Gatwick’s chief financial officer, said: “European travel, particularly on business routes, continues to steadily grow at Gatwick with passengers making the most of our extensive choice of key European destinations – the largest on offer of any UK airport.”
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