What are the busiest airline routes in the world by passengers?

What is the busiest airline route in the world? You will probably be surprised. Routes Online have released information on the Top 10 busiest routes plus some other data ahead of the World Routes 2018 conference.

The data is for the entire year of 2017, covering every air route in the world. This is from airport to airport specifically, so it doesn’t cover total traffic if a city has, for example, four airports each with a route to one other airport. Is your local airport included below? Let’s have a look and see.

Busiest Routes In The World

Below is the list of the top 10 routes that came out in the article today. It is notable that three of them involve Tokyo Haneda airport in Japan. There is quite a large gap in numbers between the top two.

01. 13,460,306 – Jeju to Seoul Gimpo (CJU-GMP)
02. 9,090,941 – Melbourne to Sydney (MEL-SYD)
03. 8,726,502 – Sapporo to Tokyo Haneda (CTS-HND)
04. 7,864,000 – Fukuoka to Tokyo Haneda (FUK-HND)
05. 7,129,943 – Mumbai to Delhi (BOM-DEL)
06. 6,833,684 – Beijing to Shanghai Hongqiao (PEK-SHA)
07. 6,769,823 – Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (HAN-SGN)
08. 6,719,030 – Hong Kong to Taiwan Taoyuan (HKG-TPE)
09. 5,271,304 – Jakarta – Juanda Surabaya (CGK-SUB)
10. 5,269,481 – Tokyo Haneda – Okinawa (HND-OKA)

All of the busiest routes are in the Asia-Pacific region. For the number one route, there are around 180 flights per day between Jeju Island and Seoul in South Korea.

Other Statistics

Interestingly, all but one of the top 10 busiest routes are domestic. Only Hong Kong to Taipei in Taiwan is international, which shows there is plenty of money to be made on short haul routes.

When it comes to international routes, all of these are again situated in the Asia-Pacific region apart from two. Those two routes are the Dubai to London route and the New York to London route.

Overall Thoughts

It is worth checking out the original article by David Casey at Routes Online. In addition to the top 10 globally, it also lists out the top 10 domestic and international routes as well as the fastest growing year on year. Around that are also some cool facts.

What do you think of this list? Are the routes what you expected? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image by Nils Nedel via Unsplash.
Jeju Island image by Douglas Knisely via Wikimedia Commons.