World’s best-connected airports: watch out for China – and Ireland

Airports are gravitational: the more passengers they have, the more passengers they attract.

That might sound counter-intuitive: don’t we all love a compact and empty airport? Yet the more passengers use a particular airport, the more likely it is that airlines will launch new routes, attracting more travellers.

While the standard measure of an airport’s importance is the number of arriving and departing passengers, another significant metric is the number of destinations served.

At the start of 2023, I asked the aviation data analysts, Cirium, for the top 20 airports by unique destinations. This week, I asked the brainy boffins to crunch the numbers to the final three months of the year. And the results are intriguing.

At the start of this year, the top four airports were all in Continental Europe – and they still are. Istanbul (302 destinations) has taken over the top spot from Frankfurt (274), while Amsterdam (261) and Paris CDG (259) have swapped third and fourth places.

Why should such a relatively small area of the world be so dominant? Dense population combined with relatively high incomes and a strong propensity to travel helps to explain the number of available routes. They also offer connectivity to travellers from other parts of the world.

Continental Europe lies between North America and Asia, and (less significantly) between Africa and the northern fringes of Europe, including the UK, Ireland and the Nordic nations.

Istanbul, at the far southeast of Europe, enjoys the best possible geo-commercial position; it serves more African destinations than any other airport (including those in Africa), and is set to remain ahead of the pack for many years.

Other parts of the world make an appearance at fifth position: shared between Dubai (up two) and Dallas-Fort Worth (up one), both with 251 routes. Chicago O’Hare slips down to seventh on 228.

While business might look more or less as usual among the top seven, in lower positions the changes are dramatic.

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