Singapore Changi Airport (SIN) saw passenger numbers surpass the pre-COVID levels for the first time in February 2024.
Passenger movements at the airport showed a 33.7% year-on-year increase in February 2024, amounting to 5.4 million people.
The airport also said that its busiest day was February 18, 2024, when it processed 203,000 passenger movements.
The milestone follows 2023’s gradual recovery during which SIN reached 86% of its pre-pandemic annual traffic levels, serving 58.9 million passengers.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the airport registered 68.3 million passenger movements in 2019.
In an exclusive interview with AeroTime at the 2024 Singapore Airshow, Tay Cheng Cheng, Changi Group’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications, said that, given the recovery and current passenger traffic, the airport remained “fairly optimistic” that it would be able to resume pre-pandemic passengers numbers in 2024.
One factor that certainly helped Changi was Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras’ tours. The popular singer held six nights of concerts in Singapore from March 2-9, 2024. Singapore was the sole Southeast Asian stop in Swift’s world tour, which meant Swifties from neighboring Asian countries flew to Singapore to watch the concert.
According to CNN, 70% of ‘The Eras’ concert-goers came from overseas.