What are the 24 routes from Heathrow airport with over 1 million passengers annually?

If you are in any doubt that air travel is back to normal, take a look at Heathrow’s record-breaking December 2023 performance.

With 6.6 million passengers, Heathrow is calling it the biggest December ever, beating pre-covid years. It’s not alone – Stansted and Manchester Airport have also reported a record-beating December with just over 2 million passengers served each.

The Heathrow numbers suggest that 2024 will comfortably beat the airport’s pre-covid record of 80.9 million passengers from 2019.

In fact, it will only take 1.7 million more passengers than 2023 to break that record – an increase of just over 2%.

In 2023, 79.2 million people passed through the airport, effortlessly sailing past the forecast of 67.2 million that it made at the end of 2022 when negotiating a fee increase with the CAA.

With a new CEO in place – and the CAA having finalised its ruling for the charges Heathrow can levy on passengers – it’s back to business as usual. The airport will want to keep its new Saudi Arabian shareholder happy and is predicting 81.4 million passengers this year.

What are Heathrow’s busiest routes?

Quietly tucked away at the bottom of the press release was a list of 24 routes with 1 million or more passengers from Heathrow. Combined, they contribute a third or more to Heathrow’s overall passenger numbers.

These are based on where the initial flight lands and do not account for connecting itineraries, which is why Dubai and Doha rank so highly. Anyone flying from Heathrow to Singapore on Emirates is counted as travelling to Dubai.

Descending from highest passenger volume (remember that all serve 1m+ Heathrow passengers per year):

• New York (JFK)
• Dubai (DXB)
• Doha (DOH)
• Dublin (DUB)
• Los Angeles (LAX)
• Madrid (MAD)
• Amsterdam (AMS)
• Frankfurt (FRA)
• Delhi (DEL)
• Istanbul (IST)
• Munich (MUC)
• Hong Kong (HKG)

• Toronto (YYZ)
• Singapore (SIN)
• Zurich (ZRH)
• Mumbai (BOM)
• Chicago (ORD)
• San Francisco (SFO)
• Paris (CDG)
• New York (EWR)
• Edinburgh (EDI)
• Lisbon (LIS)
• Boston (BOS)
• Geneva (GVA)

New York is the predictable winner and actually appears on the list twice – once for JFK (in top spot) and once for Newark.

The London to New York corridor is one of the most lucrative in the world. In 2018, Heathrow to New York JFK became the first billion-dollar route in the world for a single airline – British Airways. Add in other airlines and airports (Gatwick, Newark) and you can see how important the special relationship is to the UK.

There are a few other interesting tidbits. For example, fewer passengers travel directly to Singapore than either Hong Kong or Toronto, which surprises me.

You can clearly see the ‘Eurostar effect’ when you compare Amsterdam and Paris, with Amsterdam a full 13 spots ahead.

Boston and Geneva are both new additions to this list, having broken a million passengers for the first time last year. London to Boston has seen a number of additional flights in the past year or so, with JetBlue launching a daily service and incumbent airlines such as United responding defensively. United cut its Boston flight in October, so we may see Boston slip off this list again in 2024.