SEPANG - Despite February being a shorter month, total passenger movements at Malaysia Airports Group’s (the Group) network of airports continued to be buoyant, and recorded higher daily average passengers by 1,400 compared to January 2023. This was driven by the school holidays in Malaysia and also the increased flight frequencies by airlines in Türkiye. For February 2023, the Group registered 8.3million total passenger movements whereby 3.9million were international passengers and 4.4million were domestic passengers.
In Malaysia, the total passenger movements recorded by local airports for February 2023 were encouraging, registering 5.8million passengers and with a much higher average daily passenger movements by more than 3,480 passengers compared to January 2023. The increase by 4% over the preceding month for international average daily passenger movements was mainly contributed by the growth of passengers for the South Korea, China, and Japan sectors. It is also noteworthy that although the China sector is still in the early phase of recovery, passenger movements for the sector grew by 61% in February 2023 over January 2023. Domestic passenger movements were equally positive due to the school holidays, with more than 112,000 average daily passengers, about the same average daily passenger levels seen in January.
Meanwhile, Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen International Airport in Türkiye recorded total passenger movements of 2.5million in February 2023. International and domestic passenger movements registered 1.3million and 1.2million passengers respectively. There was a slight slowdown in the overall daily traffic in the first five to six days after an earthquake struck southern and central Türkiye. Nevertheless, the passenger movements picked up and reached 92.9% recovery against the average daily passengers prior to the earthquake for the remaining days of February. Pegasus Airlines had also added new service to Plovdiv, Bulgaria with twice weekly frequencies from 18 February 2023.