Incheon Airport Ranks First in the World for International Passengers in Semester I

Incheon International Airport in South Korea. Photo: Wikipedia.

JAKARTA - South Korea's Incheon International Airport became the world's busiest airport for international passengers in the first half of this year. Incheon served 38.39 million passengers from January to June, up 6.3 percent from the same period last year.

Kyodo News quoted Friday, August 14, saying this is the first time Incheon has ranked first in the world since it opened in 2001.

Based on the Airports Council International's provisional statistics, Incheon is in first place among the world's 1,234 airports.

London's Heathrow Airport came in below it with 37.79 million international passengers, followed by Singapore's Changi Airport with 34.53 million passengers.

Incheon's position on the global list has continued to rise in the last two decades. In 2002, the airport was ranked 10th with 20.55 million international passengers. Its ranking rose to fifth place in 2018 with 67.68 million passengers and third place in 2024 with 70.67 million passengers.

Officials at the Incheon International Airport Corp. or IIAC estimate that some of the travel flows that previously passed through Dubai and Europe switched to Incheon after transit activity at a number of Middle Eastern airports weakened following the US-Iran war.

IIAC data showed the number of transit passengers at Incheon in the first half of this year jumped 18.1 percent from the previous year to 4.24 million people.

The sharpest increase was in transit passengers on the European route, which grew 63.2 percent to 210,000 people.

The foreign passenger share also reached a record high. In the second quarter of this year, foreign passengers accounted for 44.4 percent of all passengers at Incheon Airport.