Heathrow loses 'crown' as Europe's busiest airport
Britain’s Heathrow Airport lost its dubious crown to Paris as the busiest airport in Europe as it slashed passenger forecasts for 2021 amid the coronavirus pandemic.
At the end of September, Paris Charles de Gaulle had received 19.27m passengers, ahead of Heathrow at 18.97m. Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport had received 17.6m and Frankfurt was at 16.16m, figures provided by the UK airport revealed.
Heathrow’s third quarter revenue fell 72% compared with 2019, to £239m. Pre-tax losses for the nine months to September 30 blew out to £1.5bn from a loss of £76m in 2019.
It now expected 22.6m passengers in 2020 and 37.1m in 2021, compared with the 81m who travelled in 2019, citing the second wave of Covid-19 and “slow progress on introducing testing by the UK government to reopen borders with ‘high risk’ countries”.
The revisions are a sharp reduction from estimates in June, when the economy was starting to come out of lockdown, of 29.2m in 2020 and 62.8m next year.
Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye said the UK was “falling behind because we’ve been too slow to embrace passenger testing. European leaders acted quicker and now their economies are reaping the benefits”.
“Paris has overtaken Heathrow as Europe’s largest airport for the first time ever, and Frankfurt and Amsterdam are quickly gaining ground.”