Both Dublin and Cork airports saw their busiest July ever, with record numbers of passengers travelling through the airports last month.
Figures released today by airport operator DAA revealed that over 378,000 passengers passed through Cork Airport last month, up 15 percent on July 2024.
Meanwhile, over 3.75 million passengers travelled through Dublin Airport – a 6.9 percent increase versus July 2024.
According to DAA, every day of July saw over 100,000 passengers move through Dublin Airport’s two terminals, with no fewer than 17 days seeing more than 120,000 passengers landing and taking off.
The busiest day of the record-breaking month at Dublin Airport was Sunday, July 27, when 126,620 passengers passed through.
The operator attributed the increase to “strong incoming tourist numbers” as well as “high numbers of Irish residents heading off on summer holidays overseas”.
Dublin Airport is on track to see more than 11 million passengers move through during the “peak” summer months of June, July and August, with approximately 7.3 million passengers welcomed by the airport in June and July combined.
DAA CEO Kenny Jacobs said that the number of passengers the airport saw in June and July means that they are now revising upwards their expected total passenger number for the year, to approximately 36.2 million passengers by year-end.
Mr Jacobs took aim at what he described as the “out-dated cap on passenger numbers” said that the Government needs to “follow through on its commitment to do ‘whatever we can’ to remove the needless restriction”.
“We, once again, encourage the government to share the solutions under consideration and the timeline to get this done,” he said.
The news of record passenger numbers comes after Ryanair yesterday also announced a record July, the airline stating that it had carried 20.2 million passengers last month – up three percent on the same month last year.
Last July, the airline’s load factor, which is the average proportion of seats filled on flights, was 96 percent.