Meet The Winners: Brussels Airport

Brussels Airport (BRU) passengers have the choice of 135 direct destinations from 54 airlines during the winter season, including several additional routes and two new airlines.

Royal Jordanian is offering three flights a week to Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, while flynas providing nonstop service to Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport three times a week. Transavia has also based a third aircraft at the airport, strengthening its operations and enabling an increase in frequencies.

Looking into next year, Singapore Airlines has confirmed plans to return to BRU for the first time in more than two decades. From April 2024, flights from Singapore Changi Airport will be offered four times per week.

The additional air service comes after BRU handled 1.6 million passengers in November 2023, marking a rise of 10% on the same month in 2022. The airport has now handled more than 20 million passengers in the first 11 months of the year, compared with 17.5 million during the same period last year.

Léon Verhallen, Director Aviation Development at BRU, which was an exhibitor at Routes World and is a Routes 360 member, says the airport’s short-term goal is to have fully recovered pre-pandemic traffic by the end of 2025.

Longer term, it has unveiled a strategy with three core components, including focusing on enhancing performance to provide a robust European and global network with efficient connections. The second element involves diversification into cargo, real estate, and leveraging AI across various projects. The third pillar is a commitment to sustainability, evident in the initiation of the environmental permit renewal process.

Having been named winner of the 10-20 million category at the 2023 Routes Awards, Verhallen said: “First of all, a big cheers and thank you to the airlines that nominated us. The most important thing is the team. We can only make this work with a great team of route development, market development, forecasting and traffic analysis.”