{"id":697628,"date":"2026-01-15T12:29:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T12:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/697628\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T12:29:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T12:29:11","slug":"london-heathrow-was-officially-the-second-busiest-international-airport-in-the-world-in-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/697628\/","title":{"rendered":"London Heathrow Was Officially The Second-Busiest International Airport in the World in 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, London Heathrow was crowned the\u00a0most connected airport in the world<\/a>.\u00a0The west London hub\u00a0offered travellers flights to an impressive 226 destinations across 80 different countries and so, as you\u2019d expect, it got very, very busy. In fact, a new report\u00a0revealed that Heathrow was the world\u2019s second-busiest international airport in 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OAG<\/a> looked at flight schedules data from January to December 2025 to discover which airports were the busiest internationally and globally (the latter included domestic flights) across Europe.\u00a0The report\u00a0reckoned that\u00a0LHR had 49 million scheduled international seats in 2025, which is one percent more than in 2024 and four percent more than in 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When\u00a0OAG added\u00a0together its international and domestic seat capacity, Heathrow emerged as Europe\u2019s busiest airport and the fourth busiest in the world. Altogether, it had 52.1 million scheduled seats in 2025.\u00a0Globally, the London airport was beaten by\u00a0Tokyo Haneda Airport, Dubai International Airport and\u00a0Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which took the top spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The accolade comes\u00a0a few days after Heathrow announced that it handled a record number of passengers<\/a> in 2025 \u2013 84.5 million. That\u2019s an average of more than\u00a0over 231,000 people arriving and departing each day. It also had its busiest ever December, with 7.2m passengers in total.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"People
\nPhotograph: Shutterstock <\/p>\n

Obviously, there\u2019s a major gap between\u00a0OAG\u2019s\u00a0seat capacity data and the actual number of passengers passing through Heathrow. Scheduled seat capacity is often a lot less than actual seats taken up because airlines tend to reduce their planned capacity during uncertain periods. It also isn\u2019t clear where OAG\u2019s schedules analyser counts connecting flights.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As its passengers number rise, Heathrow is waiting on approval for an enormous \u00a349 billion expansion<\/a>. The \u2018once-in-a-generation redesign\u2019\u00a0includes a third runway, a new terminal and a new junction on the M25, and hopes to boost annual capacity to a whopping 150 million.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Did you see that this\u00a0London airport was named one of the most stressful in the world<\/a>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Plus:\u00a0<\/strong>All the brand-new routes launching from London Stansted in 2026<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke \u2013 from news and reviews to events and trends. Just\u00a0<\/strong>follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stay in the loop: sign up to our\u00a0<\/strong>free Time Out London newsletter<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year, London Heathrow was crowned the\u00a0most connected airport in the world.\u00a0The west London hub\u00a0offered travellers flights to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,11648,393,4884,257,11649,183,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-697628","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-categories-travel","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-news-transport-travel","14":"tag-travel","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115899122854567769","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}