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Houston Airport System
February 11, 2008

The final 2008 passenger counts are in and the airport facilities within the Houston Airport System (HAS) have fared extremely well in comparison to other airports located across the U.S.

“Compared to many other facilities across the country, Houston’s airports are truly in great shape,” said HAS aviation director Rick Vacar.

The fluctuating price of fuel and difficult economic factors certainly had an impact in 2008. But even with those difficulties in place, both George Bush Intercontinental (IAH) and William P. Hobby (HOU) Airports managed to post total passenger counts that were extremely close to the record-levels reached in 2007.

IAH finished the year with a total of 41,709,388 passengers, a number which represents a decrease of only three percent from last year’s record-setting pace (42,998,040).

The number of international travelers passing through IAH actually represented a new all-time high. 2008 brought with it an increase of 3.1 percent in the number of international travelers, going from 7.7 million passengers in ’07 to 7.9 million in ’08.

Travel to Europe from IAH was particularly heavy in 2008, with travel to the region increasing by 4.3 percent.

Additional passengers to the Asia/Africa/Australia (AAA) region were also counted last year, with those numbers increasing by 4.1 percent over the previous year’s totals.

And there are promising signs indicating that this positive trend may very well continue into 2009, as new nonstop service is scheduled to be launched to Doha, as well as Frankfurt.

Meanwhile at HOU, the news was even more encouraging. The facility ended the year with the second-highest passenger total ever recorded in its 72-year history.

A total of 8,775,798 passengers passed through the gates in 2008, a mere 0.5 percent lower than 2007’s record-setting total of 8,819,521.

The final passenger count from ’08 most likely would have topped the ’07 number had it not been for “Hurricane Ike.” The storm turned September into a particularly difficult month, as airlines at HOU were forced to deal with both clean-up operations as well as cancelled flights.

During that month alone, passenger traffic dropped approximately 28 percent when compared to the month of September the previous year. That reduction certainly had a significant impact on the final ’08 numbers.

And a similar scenario played out in the area of air cargo. The final numbers from 2008 represented the second-highest total ever posted within the Houston Airport System.

By the end of December, HAS had handled more than 820 million pounds of air cargo, topped only by 2007’s total of 847 million pounds. The difficult economy had a particularly strong impact on the air cargo operation in the second half of 2008.

HAS entered the year’s 3rd Quarter with cargo numbers that were almost identical to the record-setting pace of ’07, but the financial slowdown had its impact in the second half of the year and a decrease of 3.2 percent was eventually recorded.

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