Hamburg Airport serves the second largest city in Germany, with a population of approximately 1.8 million people, which is three times the size of Frankfurt. It is the wealthiest city in Germany nd the fourth wealthiest city in Europe, home to seventy of Germany's top 500 companies. In 2008 there was overall growth of 0.4% with a total passenger count of 12.84.

2009 has seen many new flights and frequencies added as well as several new scheduled destinations, mainly as a result of German carriers Condor, Air Berlin, Germanwings and Lufthansa.

However other carriers to come into Hamburg include

• Norwegian operating a new 8x weekly service to Oslo
• Aer Lingus operating a new 4x weekly to Dublin
• Tuifly.com new service to Tel Aviv

Hamburg has a strong mix of leisure and business traffic and in 2009 its leading carriers in terms of weekly capacity are;

• Lufthansa - 1194 weekly flights - 39% market share
• Air Berlin - 647 weekly flights - 21% market share
• Air France/KLM - 180 weekly seats- 5% market share
• Germanwings - 115 weekly flights- 3% market share
• Tuifly.com- 102 weekly flights- 3% market share

There are over 45 airlines operating into Hamburg with the largest foreign based LCC being easyJet operating double daily to its home base of London Luton.