Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 11th of January. Who knows where the time goes? Well, who knows where the passengers go? And that is Heathrow, Manchester and Stansted airports. Three of the four

biggest airports have today put out their December results, which also reflect, of course, the final

scores at the doors for the number of passengers they handled in 2023. Let me tell you why this is important because it's probably the best

signal of how things are going in aviation and more widely what we are doing on our travels.

And yes, there will be an awful lot of people who think, hang on, record numbers of passengers,

which is what I'm just about to tell you about, that's a really bad thing.

We should be having less aviation rather than more, and we shouldn't be excited about returning

to even better than things were before the COVID pandemic.

Let me run through what we have. Biggest airport, of course,

in the UK, London Heathrow. They had their busiest ever December, 6.6 million people going through.

What's that translate? Well, that's, I calculate, 213,000 people a day. So if you can imagine the

population of a town, a city like York, going through a single

airport. That's what it would involve. Very interestingly, they had busiest day was Friday the 22nd

of December, as predicted. That has generally always been the case the last Friday before Christmas is very busy there

but they also had 142,000 people flying in and out on Christmas Day so that's kind of two-thirds of

the normal number that you would get used to be something 30, 40%. So it shows that we're much more

prepared to travel on Christmas Day, which feeds into, well, surely we should have a bit more

public transport perhaps. Well, we shall see about that. They also highlight the fact that

2023, although it wasn't the airport's busiest year, they had 79 million

passengers, so that's down from roughly 82 million in their best year 2019.

They do say that Terminal 5 has its busiest year.

I'm inferring from that that terminals 2, three and four did slightly worse than that.

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