Summer 2025 proved another time of peak passenger travel for SWISS and for Zurich Airport Ltd., the operator of the airline’s prime Zurich hub. More than 3.2 million air travelers passed through Zurich in July, some 4.8% more than had done so the previous year. SWISS alone transported 1.8 million passengers in July, and carried just over three million travelers between the end of June and mid-August – 2.4% more than it had in summer 2024. The airline operated almost 22,500 flights during this period, some 500 more than in the same period last year. The busiest travel day for both Zurich Airport and SWISS was Monday 28 July, when the airport hosted 115,547 travelers, 63,460 of whom were transported by SWISS – numbers not previously seen since the end of the COVID pandemic.
The most popular SWISS destinations this summer were London, Palma de Mallorca and Munich on the short-haul network, and New York, Chicago and Boston on the long-haul front. From Zurich Airport more broadly, Palma de Mallorca, Istanbul, Lisbon, Rome, Vancouver and Tokyo were in particularly strong demand. Zurich Airport Ltd. reports that a relatively low 26.9% of all passengers used the airport to transfer between flights, so the vast majority of its air travel users had Zurich (and Switzerland) as their point of original departure or their final destination.
Actions taken to improve punctuality
Zurich Airport and SWISS teamed up with their further airport partners to take a range of actions to meet and master the challenges posed by the high summer air travel volumes. One key tool in such endeavors is the Airport Operations Plan or AOP, which has been in use now for more than a year. The AOP provides all the partners involved – who now extend to over 4,800 active users – with real-time information that can be accessed by mobile phone at any time, on matters ranging from changed departure gates to the latest weather conditions. The AOP allows its users to respond more swiftly to any of various situations, ideally before passengers have even noticed the issue concerned.
Trials have also been conducted recently of a new Target Time Management System or TTMS, which optimizes flight arrival times in the event of system congestion, and will also determine the best landing sequence (to minimize delays and disruptions) for the flights concerned.
In further preparatory actions, Zurich Airport provided travelers with more self-service baggage tagging machines, while SWISS created its new ground function of Turnaround Managers to coordinate all the various processes that an aircraft is involved in between its arrival on one flight and its departure on the next, whose work helped save valuable minutes on numerous aircraft turnarounds throughout the summer months.
All these efforts served to stabilize processes and procedures, reduce wait times and minimize delays. In a further such measure, an additional meteorologist was employed for the airport to provide even more precise and updated weather forecasts for its flight operations.
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