El Prat Airport will continue to grow this winter, on its way to a new annual record.

BarcelonaIt's happening month after month. Barcelona Airport continues to grow and set new records. It does so after exceeding its theoretical capacity limit last year, when it recorded its first record. more than 55 million passengers, one of the main arguments for launching the El Prat expansion project, despite the social rejection that the extension of the third runway has aroused due to the environmental impacts. However, no airline has complained so far about having problems operating normally or because they are accumulating excessive delays, nor have passengers noticed it, with hot spots such as security checkpoints functioning better than previous years.

A trend that is leading the year towards passenger figures never seen before. Up to August, Barcelona Airport reached the figure of nearly 38.4 million passengers, 4.1% more than last year. "It will be a good year: we will close above last year," explained the director of El Prat, Eva Valenzuela, at the presentation ofA package of improvement works at Terminal T1 for 700 million euros aimed precisely at gaining more capacity to serve an ever-increasing number of travelers.

It is assumed that the theoretical maximum number of travelers will be exceeded even further. "In practice, this capacity can be exceeded during the day. There are peak hours—early in the morning and mid-morning—when delays can occur if there is a lot of saturation, but then there are drops throughout the day," explains UB professor Xavier Fageda, an air transport expert.

It is during off-peak hours when the airport can continue to grow, taking advantage of the fact that it does not operate as one hub like Barajas Airport, where peaks are more pronounced because intercontinental flights have more limited maneuvering room, arriving at certain times on the other side of the world and relying on connections. This is explained by the long-haul airline Level, with a good portion of its scheduled departures outside of peak hours, which leads them to point out that they have not observed "any impact" on their operations. The city's climate also favors operations, without major storms blocking runways and causing delays. All this means that El Prat is not one of the most congested airports compared to its European counterparts.

Other factors come into play when evaluating an airport's maximum capacity, such as the size of the aircraft. A flight operated in a certain time slot by a smaller aircraft, carrying fewer passengers, is not the same as a larger one, with more seats, despite occupying the same space on the runway. An issue impacted by the arrival of more intercontinental flights, but also by changes in model implemented by airlines such as Vueling, which in recent years has been opting to incorporate aircraft with greater capacity. "There is some room for further growth during off-peak hours, even if they are less competitive," explains Pere Suau-Sanchez, professor of air transport management at the UOC. In this regard, it's worth remembering that El Prat Airport has already experienced this situation. Before Terminal 1 opened in 2009, the airport was operating above its capacity limit for several years. "There are airports that handle more than 10 and 15 million passengers," adds Fageda, "but if this continues, sooner or later the infrastructure will become saturated because the bottleneck is the segregated runways."

The summer season—starting at the end of March—is the busiest season at El Prat Airport. In line with previous months, the airport has just closed its best summer in history, with 11.21 million passengers, 3.8% more than the same period last year. The all-time daily record was also surpassed, with more than 195,100 passengers arriving on August 14th, a 3.6% increase compared to the previous record, which was set on August 16th of last year.

With these figures, the deseasonalization of demand may also allow Barcelona Airport to continue setting records, which has been consolidating a stronger winter season—starting at the end of October—for years. Not only because of the needs of the existing infrastructure, but also because of changes in passenger numbers, who are increasingly fragmenting their vacations and booking days beyond the summer, not to mention climate change, with heat that allows travel beyond August.

"A good winter"

Aena has already announced that this year's winter season will be a record-breaking one across its entire network, with a 2.1% increase in scheduled seats. "It will be a good winter at El Prat," Valenzuela said this week. Only during In October, November and December, 16.2 million seats are scheduled, which represents an increase of 5.3% compared to last year, according to data from the Barcelona Tourism Observatory.

Vueling, the main airline in the Catalan capital, has scheduled more than 10 million seats, the largest offer it has made to date. With more than 100 routes and the addition of three aircraft, the Viladecans-based company has strengthened its connections with the Canary Islands at the national level, and internationally will fly more to France, Belgium, Portugal and Morocco. As new features, it will launch routes to Ljubljana (Slovenia), Agadir (Morocco) and Strasbourg (France).

In the case of Ryanair, the second airline in El Prat in terms of passengers, the headlines have been taken by the cuts that has announced at regional airports and the cancellation of all flights to Vigo and Tenerife North, in response to the increase in airport taxes announced by Aena. A decision by the Irish company that will also affect Barcelona, ​​​​which will break the growth dynamic of the rest of the airlines.

In third place in Barcelona is the Hungarian Wizz Air, which has ousted the Austrian EasyJet from the podium. El Prat is the most important airport in Spain for this low cost, which has no plans to open any bases, and this winter will operate new routes from El Prat to Bratislava (Slovakia), Warsaw (Poland) and Larnaca (Cyprus).

As is the case throughout the year, the winter season will also be marked by the leadership of the companies low costThis is one of the airport's pending issues, which advocates extending the third runway to attract more intercontinental flights. A complicated milestone without a flag carrier based in the Catalan capital, after Iberia reaffirmed its commitment to Barajas and leave it in the hands of thelow costLevel the growth of BarcelonaWith the addition of a seventh aircraft, Level has also scheduled a record-breaking winter season, with 400,000 seats, 51% more than the previous year, and significant growth in connections to New York, Boston, Miami, and Los Angeles.

Barcelona Airport currently serves 59 nonstop intercontinental destinations, the highest number in its history. The latest addition was a new connection to Shanghai with China Eastern, reinforcing a route also served by Air China. More offers for traffic between China and El Prat, which increased by 64% in the first eight months of the year, with 210,600 passengers.

Other companies that have increased their operations in the city in recent months have been the Canadian low cost WestJet, with a new route to Halifax, and Lebanese Middle East Airlines, with flights to Beirut. Starting in late October, Emirates will increase the frequency of its Dubai connection to three daily flights, and Air China will increase its Shanghai connection to four weekly flights.