Stuttgart Airport was used by 2023 passengers in the recently completed year 8.447.406. Compared to the previous period, in which there were 6.997.032 passengers, there was an increase of 20,7 percent, but the number of passengers in 2019 is still a long way away.

According to preliminary information, the number of flight movements in 2023 was 92.094 take-offs and landings, an increase of 7,3 percent compared to the previous year (2022: 85.822 flight movements). “We pretty much achieved our forecast of around 8,3 million passengers. Unfortunately, it was no longer a given in air traffic that the strong summer months went so smoothly. We owe this performance to good planning and great efforts in the operational areas. My special thanks therefore go to all of our employees at FSG, their subsidiaries and our partners for their motivated commitment. We can look forward to the coming year with confidence, in which we expect demand to continue to rise,” explains Managing Director Ulrich Heppe.

In 2019, Stuttgart Airport still had 12,7 million passengers. It initially looked as if there would be a new record volume in 2020, but the corona pandemic threw a spanner in the works. The largest airport in the German state of Baden-Württemberg was unable to fully recover from this. Financially speaking, the airport was mostly profitable, but it has been making losses ever since.

The loss of passengers is probably not only due to the fact that the price level for tickets from Stuttgart has gradually increased, but also because the offer in the low-cost segment has completely disappeared - with a few exceptions. Easyjet and Ryanair have removed Stuttgart Airport from their route network due to allegedly high fees. Blue Air, which was also previously well represented, no longer exists due to bankruptcy. The top dog in Stuttgart is the Lufthansa subsidiary Eurowings, which no longer has any competitors on many routes, which, according to the principle of supply and demand, has a negative impact on ticket costs and thus attracts fewer potential passengers.

But the Ryanair Group doesn't seem to want to give up on Stuttgart completely, as just a few weeks ago it was kThe group heavily criticized the fee level there in public. Very unusual to complain about the prices at an airport that you removed from the route network a few years ago. The subsidiary Laudamotion maintained a base in Stuttgart, but this was closed in 2020.