During the month ofFebruary, the airport handled 807,733 passengers – 83,000 more than the samemonth in 2016 and an 11.5 per cent increase.
Demand increased onboth long and short haul services with very significant growth again recordedon long-haul flights - up by a healthy 21 per cent compared to the same monthlast year. The number of passengers taking short haul flights grew bymore than nine percent year-on-year.
Announcing the newsat MIPIM 2017, Paul Kehoe, Chief Executive Officer at Birmingham Airport, said:“To record a whole two years of monthly back-to-back record breaking figures isan excellent achievement and makes Birmingham one of the UK’s fastest growingairports.
“This unprecedenteddemand, particularly to long haul destinations, goes hand-in-hand with thebooming regional economy and means this airport is becoming increasinglyattractive for airlines to serve the Midlands market.
“Only last month webroke the news that one of the world’s most recognisable brands, BritishAirways, will be returning to Birmingham Airport from this summer, becoming thetenth new airline in the last year to launch.
“Our focus now is oncompleting the £100m package of development works for the summer season toprepare the operation for our busiest period ever, and later this year we willconsult on our Master Plan to scope out how the current site can be maximisedand the benefits of HS2 realised.”
Scheduled traffic inFebruary accounted for 91 per cent of the total, with charter passengers makingup the remaining nine per cent.
Scheduled trafficoverall grew by 11.7 per cent, with significant year-on-year growth to Madrid(+292.5%), Cape Verde (+103.2%), Berlin (+39.1%), Salzburg (+34.8%) andBudapest (+30.4%).
Charter trafficexperienced 7.5 per cent growth with significant expansion on services toHurghada (+169.4%), Malaga (+31.7%), Verona (+21.9%) and Alicante (+14.7%).