Just over 144 million passengers in mainland France and overseas by 2022. These are the results just announced by the French Civil Aviation Authority (DGAC). It's a rather favourable result, since it shows that the number of passengers is now just 19.4% below the record attendance figure for 2019. For metropolitan France alone, the gap is even narrower, at 19.2%.
Strongest growth in traffic to French overseas departments and territories, Africa and the EU
In December, air traffic in France even accounted for 93.9% of its 2019 resultson the same date. Barring any major incident, it is therefore more than likely that French air transport will exceed its 2019 level in 2023..
Looking at results by segment, international sales fared slightly less well than domestic sales. This is to be expected, since come countries continued to impose entry restrictions on their territory during the year. The number of passengers thus amounted to 116.10 million outside FranceThis represents a difference of 20.2% with 2019.
The two segments that have seen the strongest recovery in 2022 are Africa and the European Union.. The traffic France-Africa was only 11.2% below 2019 for the whole of 2022, with 17.35 million passengers. In December, it was even 13.5% higher than in 2019. With 59.14 million passengers on the France-EU route, traffic for the year was 14.8% below its 2019 level. In December, it was even very close to its 2019 level at -4.5%.
Still on the international front, we note that traffic France-Amériques also performed well. It was only 18.5% below 2019 on a year-to-date basis, with 12.8 million passengers. On the other hand, France-Asia flows will continue to be the most affected in 2022. Last year represented only 54% of 2019 passenger traffic.
On the servant, domestic traffic in mainland France for the whole of 2022 represented 79.3% of 2019 traffic. That's 21.6 million passengers. However, cross-border routes performed better (86.3%) than those linking the regions to Paris (77.2%). However, it is worth noting the excellent performance of routes between metropolitan France and French overseas territories. Over 2022 as a whole, this segment generated 4.79 million passengers - down 1.3% on 2019.
Numerous changes in airport rankings
Finally, if we look at the results by airport, Beauvais, Paris-Orly and Marseille recorded the best results in the airport top 10. Beauvais, with 4.6 million passengers, even ended the year up 15.6% on 2019. Orly and Marseille ended the year down 8.4% and 10.1% respectively on 2019. By contrast, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Roissy CDG saw the slowest recovery rates.
As a result, thePassenger traffic in Marseille now exceeds that of Lyonas well as Nantes, ahead of Bordeaux airport traffic. Traffic at Basel-Mulhouse is now on a par with that at Toulouse.
