Tourism

International Traffic soared 15% at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport

Passenger traffic through Suvarnabhumi airport rose by close to 13% during the 2015 fiscal year representing a record 52.4 million.

Published

5 years ago

October 15, 2015

Boris Sullivan

Passenger traffic through Suvarnabhumi airport rose by close to 13% during the 2015 fiscal year from last October until this September representing a record 52.4 million.

Of all the 52.4 million passengers using the airport, 43.94 million were international passengers representing an increase of 15.5 percent.

Domestic passenger showed marginal 0.34% growth to 8.43 million, partly because of a sizeable shift in traffic to Don Mueang airport, which also serves the Thai capital.

During the same period, there were 319,867 flights operating out of the airport, representing an increase of 6.12 percent from the same period last fiscal year.

These flights included 242,953 international flights and 67,914 domestic flights.

The airport also handled 1.3 million tonnes of cargoes representing an increase of 0.7 percent. These included 1.24 million tonnes of cargoes shipped in and out of the country.

Since its opening in September 2006, the airport has handled more than 400 million passengers.

Suvarnabhumi international airport director Mr Siroj Duangrat estimated that the passenger’s growth rate at Suvarnabhumi international airport next year was forecasted to rise by 9.7 %, which will be beyond the capacity of the airport to handle.

The airport was originally designed to handle 45 million passengers annually.

The Thai cabinet recently approved the second-phase airport expansion project at a cost of about 55 billion baht and adopted a strategy of pushing Suvarnabhumi as an international gateway in Asia-Pacific for passenger and cargo traffic.