Paris airport traffic: start of year still lower than before the crisis

Some 7,6 million passengers were welcomed at the departure or arrival points of CDG and Orly last month, an increase of 8,7% over a year, reaching 97,8% of the volumes of January 2019, specified the ADP Group, manager of these facilities, in a press release.

The trend was mainly driven by CDG, a connection platform specializing in long-haul flights, whose passenger numbers jumped by 10,5% over a year to reach 99,3% of that of the same period six years ago.

Orly, a facility mainly handling short and medium-haul traffic, has long been at the forefront of traffic recovery in 2022 and 2023. But it marked time last month, returning to only 94,4% of the passenger volumes of January 2019, despite a 4,6% increase over one year.

These statistics should be taken with a grain of salt, as the start of the calendar year is a slow period for air transport in the northern hemisphere.

Airports serving Paris had ended 2024 with an annual increase in their traffic of 3,7% to 103,4 million travelers, or 95,8% of 2019 volumes, a drop compared to a global trend of exceeding pre-Covid passenger levels.

Domestic air traffic from Paris remained well below pre-pandemic levels last month, with only 67,4% of the number of passengers in January 2019, amid growing videoconferencing and incentives to travel by train.

In addition to its platforms in the Paris region, Groupe ADP, 50,6% owned by the French State, manages around twenty airport facilities around the world, from Almaty to Zagreb, via Delhi and Santiago de Chile.

In this area, it reached 112,4% of the number of passengers in 2019 in January, thanks to an increase of 10,1% over one year, due in particular to the dynamism of the airports co-managed by its Turkish partners TAV and Indian GMR.

Groupe ADP, which will publish its annual financial results for 2024 on Wednesday evening, is in the process of changing its CEO: CFO Philippe Pascal was proposed by the President of the Republic and approved by Parliament. His appointment, to succeed Augustin de Romanet, must still be formalized in the Council of Ministers.