Dubai Keeps Top International Airport Title

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Dubai Keeps Top International Airport Title

© vlsergey / Flickr

Over 89 million travelers passed through Dubai International last year. That makes it the top international airport in the world. It is also the fifth year in which traffic topped 80 million passengers.

The figure puts the airport ahead of other major hubs, including Tokyo, London Heathrow and Hong Kong. The airport is relatively new compared to most other international hubs, as it was built in 1960.

Most of the figures posted by the airport were not up from 2017. The airport’s expansion may well have peaked.

In terms of what the airport authority calls “customers,” the total hit 89,149,387 for the full year of 2018, which was up a negligible 1% from 2017.

[nativounit]

India kept its spot as Dubai International’s leading destination country by passenger count, with traffic for the year hitting 12,279,485. The top destinations in India were Mumbai, Delhi and Cochin. Saudi Arabia was second on the list with 6,471,142 passengers. In third place, the United Kingdom posted 6,284,771 customers. By destination, the top three U.K. cities were London at 3,817,889 customers, Mumbai at 2,540,750 and Kuwait at 2,194,576.

Two other numbers were essentially flat. The number of flights for 2018 was 408,251 (−0.3%), while the “average number of customers per flight” grew slightly to 226 (1.3%) annually.

Perhaps the best news for customers was that wait times plunged by 28% in 2018.

Finally, 2,641,383 tonnes of air freight were handled during 2018, down 0.5%.

One reason the airport carries so much traffic is that it is the hub of one of the largest and most rapidly expanding carriers in the world, Emirates. The airline represents over 40% of the traffic through the airport.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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