Record passenger numbers at Heathrow as airport enjoys holiday travel boom

Record numbers of passengers are travelling through Heathrow as the airport enjoys a holiday travel boom.

In July alone, the west London hub welcomed 7.98 million passengers through its terminals, marking its busiest month yet.

And the airport was Europe’s busiest in the first six months of the year, beating Amsterdam Schiphol, Frankfurt, Madrid and Paris Charles de Gaulle.

But Heathrow’s chief executive warned it had lost 90,000 passengers on routes subject to a “devastating” £10-per-person charge.

Despite that, the airport broke records and had six of its busiest departure days in July as the number of travelers soared after schools ended for the summer.

And tourists avoided disruptions caused by the Just Stop Oil protests and the CloudStrike service outage that triggered a global computer meltdown last month.

Popular destinations for Brits travelling abroad this summer include Venice in Italy and Larnaca in Cyprus.

Qatar’s capital Doha, Dublin, Dubai and New York’s JFK airport were the latest routes to reach one million passengers this year.

There was also high demand for flights to Orlando, Florida, and many other US destinations including Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Dallas, a Heathrow spokesman said.

Before last month, the airport had never surpassed 1.8 million passengers in a week, but it broke that record three weeks in a row in July.

During the week in which school ended for the summer holidays (July 22), more than 140,000 direct passengers and almost 140,000 bags left the airport every day.

Cargo tonnage rose 8 percent in July 2024 compared with the previous year, which Heathrow says underlines the airport’s position as the UK’s leading air cargo hub.

Heathrow boss Thomas Woldbye said: “In July we broke a passenger record almost every day and we are pursuing our never-before-seen target of serving 8 million passengers in a single month.”

But despite rising passenger numbers, Heathrow has warned that the rollout of the electronic travel authorisation (ETA) system, introduced last year, could be “devastating”.

Nationals travelling from Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan without a visa must have an ETA, which costs £10 per person.