Manchester Airport celebrates sixth consecutive record-breaking month

Manchester Airport has had its sixth consecutive record-breaking month, with more than 2.1 million passengers travelling via its terminals in March 2024.

The early Easter has helped make March 2024 the busiest March for Manchester Airport on record. March performance for the airport has seen passenger numbers increase 12% on March 2023, and exceeding the hub’s pre-pandemic record of 2 million.

At the same time – for the second consecutive month – every single passenger waited for less then 15 minutes to get to security.

The most popular destinations for travel from Manchester Airport included long-weekend favourites, Dublin and Amsterdam, summer holiday hotspots Tenerife and Alicante, as well as Dubai, a popular destination in its own right as well as a stopping point for connections to more far-flung places.

Looking ahead to April, Manchester Airport is anticipating another record-breaking month, with the Easter Bank Holiday weekend seeing 320,000 passengers travelling through the airport, an 8% increase on Easter 2023.

Alongside Manchester Airport achieving record-breaking passenger numbers, March has also seen another milestone reached in the delivery of its £1.3 billion Transformation Programme.

A new multi-million pound baggage system has been installed at Terminal 2 as part of plans for the terminal to serve 70% of airport passengers from 2025.

The one-of-a-kind system has been built by specialists Vanderlande specifically for the airport. It features more than two miles of conveyor belts and can process 3,000 bags per hour – it has already processed over 100,000 bags since it went live at the end of March. The maximum distance a bag could travel from check in to being taken onto an aircraft is 582 metres – equivalent to almost six football pitches. On average a bag will take around 10 minutes to get through the system before being picked up by ground handling agents and put onto an aircraft.

Manchester Airport Managing Director Chris Woodroofe said:

“We are proud to serve the people of the North. On the surface that means offering an unrivalled range of more than 200 destinations, great service so that passengers never wait more than a few minutes to get to security and world class facilities in our terminals.

“But beneath the surface there is a huge amount of work that goes into making that happen. We’re in the middle of a £1.3bn programme that is completely transforming the airport. A key component of that is this new baggage system that will help make sure things continue to run smoothly behind the scenes.

“So while passengers will see the difference as they pass through Terminal 2 – which has already won the prestigious Prix Versailles award for its architecture and design – equally important changes have been made in the parts of the airport that most people will never see meaning that as demand for travel continues to increase, the service we offer our passengers continues to improve.”