But it’s not tourists who are landing
BY THE END of the year Cyprus’ two airports will have seen a record number of seven million passengers, airport operators Hermes said yesterday.
According to a statement from the consortium, more than six million passengers travelled through Larnaca and Paphos airports between January and November this year.
“This sets Cyprus on course to see a new record,” said Hermes. “By the end of the year the total movement of passengers will for the first time reach seven million.”
Hermes said the previous record was in 2005 when 6,781,643 passengers travelled through the island’s airports, more than five million through Larnaca and the remainder through Paphos.
This number has already been exceeded in 2007, Hermes said.
In November Hermes recorded passengers movements of 365,000 in the two airports, which was some 4.3 per cent up on November 2006. Larnaca in particular saw an increase of seven per cent in November over the same month last year.
Jenni Fernando, the Director of Marketing at Hermes said: “We are very satisfied with what we observed for the month of November. There was an intense movement of passengers and we are hopeful that for 2007 we will achieve a new record.”
But despite the good news on passenger movement at the island’s airports in November, less than one third of those who used the airports were tourists.
Numbers released by the Statistical Services yesterday showed that 94.741 tourists visited the island last month compared to 95.682 in 2006, drop of 1.0 per cent.
The UK market, the island’s biggest, continued its decline. In November this year the fall reached 5.5 per cent. A decline of 4.5 per cent was seen in the arrival of German tourists in November over the same month last year.
The inflow from Russia and Greece continued however with an increases of 21 per cent and 0.9 per cent respectively. Russia has replaced Germany as Cyprus’ second-biggest market.
Between January and November this year tourist arrivals totalled 2,342,338 compared to 2,329,902 for the corresponding period in 2006, recording an increase of 0.5 per cent.
Last week figures released by the EU showed that passenger traffic to and from Cyprus last year was down one per cent over 2005. Cyprus and Malta were the only two EU countries where numbers fell that year.
Malta dropped 2.1 per cent while average growth in passenger traffic in the bloc reached 4.7 per cent.
Four member states recorded growth of 30 per cent or more compared to 2005. Romania saw increased traffic of 35 per cent, Slovakia 34 per cent, Latvia 33 per cent and Poland 31 per cent.
Eight member states reported an increase of more than 10 per cent. These included Ireland and seven other countries from central and Eastern Europe.
London/Heathrow, despite a fall of 0.5 per cent in passenger numbers between 2005 and 2006, remained the EU’s busiest passenger airport with 67 million passengers in 2006.
Paris/Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt/Main were the second and third busiest airports, followed by Amsterdam’s Schiphol. Larnaca was the EU’s 58th busiest airport in 2006.
