Flying tourists: the Italian flight market grows. Here are the airports that do best

By now June begins the season devoted to travel: let’s see what trends are emerging from attendance in art cities and airline bookings with data provided by “The Data Appeal Company” to the Ministry of Tourism and processed by it. In April, the number of offers “sold” compared to the number of offers available in the major online booking portals return a clear attraction of tourists to the art cities of Lazio (47 percent), Sicily (44 percent), Campania (42 percent), Veneto (39 percent) and Friuli-Venezia Giulia (39 percent). In terms of average prices for stays, Lazio also records the highest values, followed by Veneto (€229), Lombardy (€216), Tuscany (€203) and Trentino-Alto Adige (€162). Prices calculated for one-night stays in a double room. All major art cities register a “saturation” rate above the national average, confirming the high degree of attractiveness especially in the spring period. They lead Florence (49 percent), Rome (48 percent) and Venice (45 percent).

On the flight front, for April 2024 airline bookings show a slight growth in the domestic market (+1%), which stands at 26% of the total, and a decline in the international market (-8%), 74% of the total, compared to April 2023. The overall decline (-6%) is almost all attributable to the first week of the month, in contrast to March, which showed a 7% increase. The source markets see the United States covering a 7 percent slice followed by Germany and France at 6 percent, while the remaining 55 percent is shared by all other countries of the world confirming the international vocation of our country. Tourists’ favorite airport hubs are confirmed to be Rome (32%), Milan (29%) and Venice (7%) while in the South they lead Naples (5%) and Catania (5%) in terms of the period in advance of travel with which they book in April there is a reduction in the average lead time, with a tendency to postpone the booking of direct flights to Italy (-4 days vs ’23). This phenomenon is particularly evident for tourists from the UK (-11 days vs ’23) while for countries bordering the Mediterranean the effect is less pronounced. The U.S. (+11 days vs. ’23) and Germany (+9 days vs. ’23) book earlier while domestic tourists are in line with 2023 values.

As for the average stay of travelers in Italy in April shows a slight decrease compared to the previous year (-1.1 nights vs ’23). The average stay of tourists from European countries is between 4 and 5 nights, while that of the United States is around 10 nights. Domestic travelers, on the other hand, stay an average of 3 nights.

Let’s look in detail at the performance of a few airports in particular. Bologna’s Marconi in April neared 1 million passengers with an increase of more than 12 percent over 2023. In detail, driving the growth are passengers on domestic flights (243,992, +18.2% over the same month in 2023), but passengers on international flights also perform well (736,842, +10.6% over April 2023). Movements, at 7,094 (+11.7%), and air cargo, at 3,634 tons (+18.4%), also grew. The most popular destinations for Marconi passengers in April were: Catania, Tirana, Barcelona, Palermo, Madrid, Brindisi, Paris De Gaulle, Istanbul, Cagliari, and Bucharest.

In the first four months of 2024, total passengers were 2,928,854, up 9.5 percent over the same period in 2023, while movements were 21,913, up 7.6 percent over 2023. It should be noted that over the whole of 2023 in the Bologna airport also exceeded pre-pandemic traffic levels (+6.0% over 2019), touching 10 million passengers (busiest day of the year: July 16, with over 40 thousand passengers). In the ranking of the “most flown” destinations in 2023 we find Catania, Barcelona, and Palermo in the top three places (as in 2022). They are followed by: Tirana, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Madrid, London Heathrow, Istanbul, Frankfurt and Brindisi.

Staying in central Italy we see a new all-time high for the Tuscan airport system, formed by the airports of Florence and Pisa. With more than 810,000 total passengers passing through the regional capital’s airports in the city of the Leaning Tower, marking a

12.0 percent increase over the same month of the previous year. This result was mainly due to the 10.2% increase in total passenger flight movements, which offset the slight decrease (-0.4%) in the “load factor,” which stood at 82.9%. Overall, about 2.3 million passengers were registered in the first four months of the year, showing an increase of 13.2% compared to the same period in 2023.

Taken individually, we see that passenger traffic at Florence’s Amerigo Vespucci Airport continues in its growth trend, with a new monthly record. In the month of April, nearly 319,000 passengers used the Florence airport, marking the best April ever with a 19.5 percent increase over the previous year. Increases were recorded in both flight movements (up 7.6 percent from 2023) and load factor (up 0.3 percentage points, or 79.2 percent). In April, domestic scheduled traffic grew by 54.9 percent, while international traffic increased by 15.5 percent compared to the same month in 2023. The five most popular destinations from Florence Airport in April 2024 were Paris, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, and Munich.

Overall, with records achieved in every single month, Florence Amerigo Vespucci Airport totaled 944,000 passengers in the first four months of 2024, up 26.5 percent from the previous year. Pisa’s Galileo Galilei Airport also had a record April, with 492,000 passengers passing through, corresponding to a 7.6 percent increase over the same month in 2023. The 12.9 percent growth in passenger flight movements more than offset the slight decline (-0.5 percent) in load factor, which stood at 85.5 percent. Scheduled international passenger traffic showed solid growth of 13.5 percent, more than offsetting the 8.8 percent decline recorded by the domestic component. The most popular destinations for passengers were London, Tirana, Catania, Paris, and Palermo. In the first four months of 2024, nearly 1.4 million passengers passed through Pisa Airport, up 5.5 percent from the same period in 2023.

For the months from April to October, the northeastern airport hub, which includes the airports of Venice, Treviso, and Verona, expects traffic volumes to grow by 5 percent compared to the summer of 2023, with about 13million total passengers expected (with a definite recovery from 2019 when the three airports handled 12.7million passengers in the same period). The prospects would be higher, if at Marco Polo the main low-cost carriers (Ryanair and Wizz Air ) had not halted their development programs due to the choice of the Venice Municipality to introduce from May 2023 the new surcharge of 2.50 euros per passenger departing from the airport. Venice’s “Marco Polo” is confirmed as the third domestic intercontinental gateway, further strengthened by the vibrancy of the North American market, which reconfirms summer connections to Atlanta, Chicago, New York JFK, New York Newark, Philadelphia, Montreal and Toronto.

Photo: Marco López

Flying tourists: the Italian flight market grows. Here are the airports that do best

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