Two of Europe’s largest hub airports — Frankfurt and London Heathrow — saw traffic fall during June due to the continued impact of the Iran war.
Frankfurt’s operator Fraport said that the airport catered for 5.7 million passengers in June, which was a drop of 1.7 per cent compared with June 2025. This was due to Middle East traffic remaining down by 27 per cent year-on-year despite a “month by month” recovery in travel to the region.
For the first six months of 2026, Frankfurt’s traffic was down by 0.8 per cent year-on-year to 28.9 million. Middle East traffic fell by 35 per cent compared with the same period of 2025, although passenger numbers rose by 6.4 per cent to the Far East and increased by 8 per cent to Africa. The airport was also adversely impacted by strikes held by Lufthansa staff earlier in the year.
Fraport’s CEO Stefan Schulte said the first half of 2026 had been affected by “many extraordinary factors”, including the impact of the Iran war on both the availability and price of jet fuel, which has also led to reduced demand from passengers.
“As a result, airlines were forced to reduce capacity, in some cases quite significantly. Taken together, all of these factors are dampening our passenger outlook for Frankfurt Airport. After a slight decline in the first half of the year, we now project full-year passenger volumes to remain at about 2025 levels,” added Schulte.
It was a similar story at Heathrow, where traffic in June was down by 1.8 per cent year-on-year to 7.2 million passengers — Middle East traffic slumped by 25 per cent, while passenger numbers to Asia Pacific rose by 2.5 per cent over the same period. Traffic to North America was also up by 1.2 per cent year-on-year for the month, which was attributed to the impact of the World Cup FIFA football tournament.
Heathrow did manage to achieve a small (0.2 per cent) year-on-year increase for the first half of the year, as total traffic was just below 40 million passengers. But the airport has already tempered its expectations for the rest of 2026 due to “softening” demand.
Thomas Woldbye, Heathrow’s CEO, said: "It’s been a strong end to the first half of 2026, despite the challenges presented by the situation in the Middle East. Sustained growth in North American and Asia-Pacific coupled with climbing cargo volumes demonstrates the strength of demand for global connectivity.”
Meanwhile, ACI Europe figures for May showed that Heathrow was still the busiest airport in Europe — but it only ranked ahead of Istanbul Airport by 3,000 passengers with traffic of 7.12 million for the month.
Total European airport traffic in May rose by 3.2 per cent year-on-year, according to ACI Europe, which compared with a drop of 0.7 per cent in April.