Flights through Dutch airports picking up again, still below pre-pandemic levels

In the second quarter of 2021, a total of 3.9 million passengers traveled to or from one of the five national airports in the Netherlands. That is over four times more than the second quarter of 2020, but still 18 million less than in the second quarter of pre-pandemic 2019, Statistics Netherlands said on Tuesday.

The amount of transported air cargo increased by 33 percent to 456 thousand tons in the second quarter of this year, and is therefore also higher than the same quarter in 2019. In the second quarter there were nearly 54 thousand cargo flights, 2.5 times more than a year earlier.

The coronavirus pandemic brought air travel to a halt in March 2020. The aviation industry is now slowly recovering. In the first quarter of this year, 21 million passengers passed through Dutch airport terminals. So quarter two saw an 83 percent increase. After the government allowed travel to countries with a low number of coronavirus infections from May 15, over 3 million passengers traveled through the Dutch airports.

In addition to the number of passengers, the number of passenger flights also increased. In the second quarter of 2021, there were 44 percent more passenger flights than in the first quarter. In the first quarter of this year, an average of 35 out of every 100 seats on passenger flights were full. In the second quarter, that increased to 44 out of 100.

The most popular destination in the second quarter was Spain. 593 thousand passengers flew between a Dutch and Spanish airport, over 15 percent of the total number. The United States was second with 7 percent of passengers.