The number of people taking flights in Europe this July came the closest ever to a full recovery to pre-pandemic levels.

A new report released by The ACI EUROPE today revealed that passenger traffic grew by 12.8 per cent compared to the same time last year.

Passenger traffic across the European airport network was only 3% less than it had been in July 2019.

Dublin airport remained on similar passenger numbers for July of this year, when compared with pre-pandemic numbers – while Ireland as a whole had 0.6% more air traffic.

Some airports saw  a significant rise on air traffic due to Ultra-Low-Cost Carriers’ expansion - with the Albanian airport seeing a rise of 116.6% on pre-pandemic numbers

Airports in Uzbekistan (+72.6%), Armenia (+70.4%) and Kazakhstan (+66.4%) benefitted from the shift in demand to/from Russia away from the EU airports.

London Heathrow was the busiest European airport, but traffic was still 1.2% less than it had been in 2019.