Between 2013 and 2023 the number of passengers at Sicilian airports (excluding the Lampedusa and Pantelleria airports) grew by 61.4 percent compared to a national figure of 36.8 percent. In particular, the Catania airport absorbs over half of the traffic, that of Palermo almost 40 percent, that of Trapani approximately 6 percent. In fact, almost 70 percent of traffic is concentrated between April and October, with greater intensity for the international component (77.4 percent compared to 65.3 for the national one). Travelers on international flights increased most intensely: their incidence on the total number of passengers transported increased by approximately 8 percentage points. Good performance to which all the island’s airports contributed with the exception of Trapani, where a contraction of 29.4 percent was recorded due to a strong reduction (between 2018 and 2021) of the presence of the main carrier active in the airport .
The data is contained in the report on the economy in Sicily, drawn up by Bank of Italy and presented today in Palermo. “The increase in passengers was significantly higher than the number of seats offered (44.6 percent) – we read in the report -, with a consequent increase in the load factor (ratio between the number of passengers and the number of seats offered ), went from 75.0 to 84.1 percent”. Last year, airport traffic to and from the island recorded almost 144,000 flights for a total of around 21 million passengers transported (over a tenth of the Italian total), continuing the recovery that began in 2021 and widely exceeding pre-pandemic levels .
