India emerges as world`s fifth biggest aviation market in 2024 with 211 million passengers: IATA
The International Airport Transport Association (IATA) in its latest edition of the World Air Transport Statistics (WATS) for 2024, has showed that handling 211 million passengers, India emerged as the world's fifth biggest aviation market with Mumbai-Delhi being one of the busiest airport pairs in 2024. India saw 11.1% year-on-year (Y-o-Y) surge in air passengers to 211 million in 2024, ahead of Japan, which handled 205 million passengers with an annual rise of 18.6%. The report highlighted that US remains the world's biggest aviation market on the back of strength of its domestic market growing 5.2% Y-o-Y to 876 million passengers. Further, the China was the second-biggest passenger market, which grew 18.7% Y-o-Y to 741 million passengers, followed by the UK at the third spot with 261 million passengers and Spain at the fourth position with 241 million passengers.
Besides, Mumbai-Delhi airport was the seventh busiest airport, carrying 5.9 million passengers, among top 10 airport pairs in 2024. Further, among the world's busiest airport pairs Asia Pacific dominated the ranking with Jeju-Seoul (CJU-GMP) being the most popular route globally, with 13.2 million passengers flying between the two airports in 2024. Meanwhile, Jeddah-Riyadh (JED-RUH) was the only airport pair which among top 10 but not in the Asia Pacific region.
The report also revealed that the international premium class travel -- business and first class -- grew 11.8%, outpacing growth in global economy travel of 11.5%. In 2024, the total number of international premium class travellers was 116.9 million or 6% of the total international passengers. In the Asia Pacific region economy class passenger numbers grew 28.6% year-on-year outpacing the growth of premium passengers, which grew 22.8% year-on-year. Meanwhile, the growth in premium travel exceeded economy class travel in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North America. Europe remained the largest market for international premium travel, with 39.3 million premium passengers, while premium travellers as a percentage of all travellers were highest in the Middle East at 14.7%.
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