May 2025 air traffic shows continued resilience

ACI EUROPE’s May traffic report reveals continued resilience in passenger traffic performance across Europe – albeit, with persistent performance gaps amongst individual markets.

Passenger traffic in the European airport network increased by +3.4% in May compared to May 2024 (+8% above May 2019 levels). However, this overall increase was driven entirely by international passenger traffic (+4.3% vs. May 2024) rather than domestic (-0.2% vs. May 2024).

Airports outside the EU+ market experienced the most growth, with passenger volumes growing by +6% compared to +2.9% for the EU+ market. Within the EU+ market, significant gaps between countries appeared: from +33% for top-performing Slovakia to -6.2% for Estonia. Amongst the largest EU+ markets, the best results came from Italy (+4.4%), Spain (+3.3%) and the UK (+1.7%) while Germany (+0.8%) and France (+0.7%) significantly underperformed, hampered by punitive national aviation taxes.

By airport size, small airports (less than 1 million passengers) outperformed all other segments of the airport industry with a passenger traffic increase of +11% year on year. Major airports (over 40 million passengers) experienced the slowest growth at +2.7% year on year.

Find out more in ACI EUROPE’s press release.