PHOTO
The Dubai International airport (DXB) needs to expand its capacity to accommodate the significant growth in passenger traffic, according to Dubai Airports CEO, Paul Griffiths.
The world’s busiest airport for international travel reported on Tuesday it served 41.6 million travellers in the first six months of the year. The figure is up around 50% from the same period a year ago and exceeded the pre-pandemic passenger traffic in the first half of 2019.
Passenger numbers at the airport are now forecast to hit 85 million by the end of the year, close to the 89.1 million passengers recorded in the aviation hub’s busiest year, 2018.
In a recent interview, Griffiths said the airport needs to accelerate its capacity to handle passenger growth.
“DXB is probably good to [accommodate] 110 to 120 million, so we’ve still got a growth figure of about 30 million to accommodate,” Griffiths told Bloomberg Middle East.
“We’ve got a lot of initiatives: new lounges, new circulation space reconfigured, remote gate operations – all sorts of things, which will improve capacity and service quality, but in the longer term, it has to be DXB phase 2 for sure,” he added.
He noted that tourism in Dubai is “booming”, so “we have to have an infrastructure to cope with that”.
Griffiths earlier confirmed plans to invest $2.7 billion to boost airport capacity over the “next 12 to 13 years”, which will include improvements in DXB’s three terminals and additional remote aircraft parking spaces.
(Writing by Cleofe Maceda; editing by Seban Scaria)
