London Heathrow saw its passenger numbers fall by 7.5 per cent year-on-year last month after the airport was forced to suspend flights for 10 hours on 21 March due to a power outage caused by a nearby fire.
The UK’s busiest airport catered for 6.2 million passengers in March, down from 6.7 million in the same month in 2024. Heathrow said its traffic had also been impacted by Easter being held in April this year, as well as the timing of Ramadan.
Despite the fall in traffic last month, Heathrow insisted that it was “still on track” to record its busiest ever year in 2025 – exceeding the existing record of 83.9 million passengers set last year.
The airport highlighted the launch of new long-haul routes from Heathrow by Virgin Atlantic, British Airways and Air Canada, as well as the introduction of short-haul services to Rimini in Italy and Tbilisi in Georgia.
In March, passenger numbers flying from Heathrow to all global regions saw a year-on-year drop in traffic, apart from traffic to and from Latin American destinations, which rose by 0.7 per cent.
Heathrow’s traffic for the first quarter of 2025 was also down by 1.5 per cent compared to the same period last year with 18.25 million passengers using the airport from January to the end of March.
Although the airport’s traffic was up by 3.5 per cent to 83.6 million travellers when looking at the “rolling” 12-month total between April 2024 and March 2025.
Meanwhile, Airports Council International (ACI) World ranked Heathrow as the fifth busiest airport in the world in 2024 – down one place from 2023 – in a new report on global air traffic.
Only Atlanta, Dubai, Dallas Fort Worth and Tokyo Haneda catered for more passengers last year than Heathrow. While Istanbul was the other European hub to feature in the world’s top 10 list in seventh place.
Heathrow was the world’s second busiest airport for international traffic in 2024 at 79.2 million passengers – behind Dubai (92.3 million).
Four other European hubs also featured in the top 10 for international traffic: Amsterdam Schiphol in fourth place with 66.8 million, Paris Charles de Gaulle in fifth with 64.5 million, Istanbul (7th, 63 million) and Frankfurt (8th, 56.2 million).
ACI World said that total airline traffic in 2024 reached 9.5 billion passengers, which was an increase of 9 per cent compared with 2023 and up by 3.8 per cent from the pre-pandemic year of 2019.
The report added that ACI World was predicting a further 4.8 per cent year-on-year increase in global airline passengers in 2025, which would raise passenger numbers to around 9.9 billion this year.
“While passenger demand remains strong, the pace of expansion is expected to slow as markets shift from recovery-driven surges to structural, long-term growth patterns,” said ACI World in its report.
“Key challenges such as economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions and capacity constraints are expected to increasingly shape the industry’s trajectory.”