‘Airports expected to host over 200 mln passengers this year’

ANKARA

Türkiye’s airports are expected to serve more than 200 million passengers this year, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu has said.

Türkiye has been working to take advantage of its geographical location to become the world’s transit air travel center, increasing the number of domestic flight destinations from 26 in 2022 to 57, while the number of countries with Türkiye signed the air transport agreements grew from 81 to 173, he said.

“Thanks to those agreements, the international destinations network expanded from 60 in 50 countries to 342 in 130 nations,” the minister added.

Türkiye is located only at a four hours-flight distance from 67 countries with a total population of 1.65 billion and a combined national income of $43.2 trillion and foreign trade volume of $11 trillion, Uraloğlu said.

Uraloğlu noted that the number of passengers Turkish airports served grew more than 42 percent in 2022 from a year earlier to over 182 million people, while airplane traffic increased by 28 percent to 1.88 million.

He said that more than 73 million passengers went through the airports in Türkiye in the first five months of the year, while the airplane traffic was more than 786,000.

“We forecast that passenger traffic will surpass 200 million this year,” Uraloğlu said.

According to the data from the General Directorate of State Airports Authority (DHMİ), the total passenger traffic at Turkish airports grew by 28.8 percent year-on-year in the January-May period.

The international passenger tally rose 38 percent from a year ago to 39.4 million, while domestic passengers were up 19.6 percent to 34 million in the first five months of 2023.