Prague Airport’s Last Year in Numbers: Passenger Numbers up by 29 Percent

A total of 13,828,137 passengers passed through the gates of Václav Havel Airport Prague last year, amounting to a year-on-year increase of 29 percent.

Travellers were able to use new long-haul routes to Seoul, Taipei, and exotic holiday retreats. Combined, the airport offered connections to 167 destination and over 30 new or resumed operations by 69 air carriers.

The original forecast proposed around 12.5 million handled passengers, which was successfully exceeded.

Jiří Pos, Chairman of the Prague Airport Board of Directors, said that in 2023 the airport got close to the 2019 number of handled passengers, reaching 78 percent of that year’s figures.

“In the 2019 record year, 190 destinations were flown to from Prague, while in 2023, we recorded 167. At the same time, we were able to resume or launch several long-haul routes, for example to Seoul in South Korea with Korean Air and to Taiwan with China Airlines. Another indisputably positive move is represented by the long-haul charter services of LOT Polish Airlines and World2Fly, which offer direct flights to exotic holiday destinations such as the Dominican Republic, Thailand, and Sri Lanka.”

Other routes which expanded the flight schedule include, for example, Agádír in Morocco (Eurowings), Bilbao in Spain (Vueling), Dubrovnik in Croatia (Croatia Airlines), and the East Midlands in England (Ryanair and Jet2.com).

Ryanair has also added new routes to Gdańsk in Poland, Rimini in Italy, Seville in Spain, and the Greek island of Skiathos. After a break, Korean Air returned to Prague with its route from Seoul.

New additions to airport operations are the Icelandic carrier of Icelandair with its flights to Keflavík, China Airlines with its route to Taiwan, and World2Fly, which started offering direct charter flights to Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

In 2023, the most passengers took flights to Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and France, with the most often used direct connections, by 1.1 million passengers, being those between Prague and London.

Paris followed with almost 700 thousand passengers, and Milan took third place with 545 thousand passengers. Around 538 thousand passengers flew to Amsterdam and a total of 440 thousand passengers travelled to Istanbul. Smartwings, Ryanair, Wizz Air, easyJet, and Eurowings carried the most passengers last year.

In 2024, Prague Airport expects to handle 15.5 million passengers, to whom it will offer more than 170 destinations with increases in frequencies on more than 30 connections.

For comparison, in 2019, Prague Airport offered 190 direct connections, of which 16 were destinations in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Belarus, on which operations are now disrupted.