In the first month of the new year, the number of passengers rose by 1.4% compared to January 2019 and the number of flights to and from Schiphol rose by 1.0%, partly due to a number of cancellations in the same month last year. On average, the number of seats per flight was just under one seat more than last year. These developments resulted in a total of 5.1 million passengers travelling to, from or via Schiphol in January 2020. The number of cargo flights dropped to 1,011, a decline of 10.2% compared to January last year. As a result, the tonnage of cargo transported decreased by 7.8% compared to the previous year.
Passenger destinations
January saw nearly 3.4 million passengers travelling to and from European destinations (+2.2%), with destinations in Spain, Italy and Poland continuing to gain in popularity. The loss of WOW Air at the end of March 2019 is still clearly noticeable in the statistics, as air traffic to and from Iceland dropped by 30% compared to the same month one year ago. However, this is the only significant decrease in passenger volume within Europe.
Asia
The number of intercontinental passengers at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol increased slightly (+0.2%) to a total of 1.6 million. The decline in Asia was 7.0% compared to January 2019 due to the withdrawal of Jet Airways, with the passenger volume to and from India in particular dropping by over 42%. The passenger volume to China rose by 2.4% in January compared to the same month last year. Part of the reason for this relative increase is that in 2020, the Chinese New Year was in January, while in 2019, it was in February.
Corona virus
In the last few days of January, the impact of the Corona virus on air traffic became clearly visible, particularly flights to and from mainland China. Many airlines responded to the outbreak of the Corona virus by temporarily discontinuing or reducing the number of connections from Schiphol to mainland China. The effect of these measures will be clearly apparent in the air traffic statistics for February.
Click here for the complete overview of traffic and transport figures for January 2019.
13 February 2020