Due to the corona crisis, the number of air passengers to and from the Netherlands fell by 82.6 percent last year. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), 14.1 million people traveled to and from one of the five national airports in the Netherlands between March last year and February this year.
According to Statistics Netherlands, the enormous decrease is due to the travel ban that the cabinet announced in March last year. The day after the press conference on March 13, the number of passengers fell by more than half. In the weeks that followed, numbers continued to decline, reaching a low of 24,600 passengers in mid-April. A year earlier this was still 1.6 million.
The number of flights fell less sharply than the number of passengers: 258,000 flights, more than half less than a year earlier. Passenger planes were therefore less full in 2020. With fewer flights, CO2 emissions also decreased: they decreased by almost half.
Destinations
The most popular destinations remained virtually the same as in previous years. Almost 75 percent of the passengers traveled to a destination within Europe. This mainly concerned the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy. Outside the EU, this concerned the United States, Turkey and Switzerland.
According to Statistics Netherlands, the corona measures had little effect on the amount of goods transported. Due to flight restrictions, fewer flights were operated in the first months, but these were more than overtaken by the end of September.
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