Fun Facts from Brussels Airport

If you love Trivial Pursuit and random, fun facts, Brussels Airport has some numbers for you. The airport just released some 2018 statistics, sharing everything from the list of top destinations to how much chocolate is sold in its shops EVERY MINUTE! Yes, it’s more than 6 lbs.kg every minute!

Food & Beverage by the Numbers 

Chocoholics rejoice! Belgium is the world’s chocolate capital. If you didn’t pick some up in town, don’t worry. There is a great selection at the airport. And don’t forget to sample the world-famous Belgian beer. Airport visitors certainly don’t!

Wash your chocolate down with a Belgian beer, as scores of travelers do. If you are more of a coffee and croissant kind of traveler, that option is also available.

Here are some quirky sales statistics that may whet your appetite. 

• • Chocolate – 2.8 kg per minute (6.17 lbs)
  • Beer – 1,162 liners
  • Coffee – 7,999 cups  
  • Pastries – 4,453

Planes, Passengers, Things Left Behind

With 80 airlines and 248 destinations, Brussels Airport is buzzing. Planes carried more than 25.7 million passengers and 732,000 tons of cargo in 2018. With all those travelers, there was lots of baggage: 41,917 pieces of luggage were handled daily. Of course, with all that volume, a few things may lose their way. More than 21,120 items were separated from their owners. Coats, bags, phones. You name it! Hopefully, most were reunited with their owners.

And speaking of buzzing, the airport produced 46 kilograms of honey from 80 varieties of bees last year. Sweet!

All-Season Drive

Belgium doesn’t get much snow, but the airport has 38 snow-clearing vehicles in the event Mother Nature dumps some of the white stuff in Brussels. The airport is well prepared in the event of a power outage, too. A total of 12,980 solar panels generate 2,792 MWh of power!

More Fun Facts

Here are a few things you don’t know, and may not particularly care about learning, but, heck they’re fun facts. In 2018, Brussels Airport…

• • Sold 600,000 bottles of perfume
  • Purified 435,397,300 liters of waste
  • Had 107,978,723 sheets of toilet paper used
  • Passengers traveled on nearly 8,400 feet (2,558 metres) of walking sidewalks and 1,929 feet (588 metres) of escalators

Top Destinations from Brussels

What were the hot European destinations? Spain and Portugal topped the list in 2018. The top five cities were:

1. 1. Madrid, Spain
   2. Barcelona, Spain
   3. Lisbon, Portugal
   4. Rome, Italy
   5. London, England

The top long-haul destinations were:

1. 1. Dubai, United Arab Emirates
   2. New York City, New York
   3. Tel Aviv, Israel
   4. Washington, DC
   5. Montreal, Canada

You can fly more places from Brussels, too. The airport added new destinations in 2018. They are:

• • China – Hong Kong and Shenzhen
  • Croatia – Zadar 
  • Dominican Republic – Puerto Plata
  • France – Rennes
  • Georgia – Tbilisi
  • Greece – Kalamata and Mytilene
  • Kenya – Mombasa
  • Jordan, Amman

Check out more fun facts here.