Manchester Airport records busiest ever summer

Nearly 7 million passengers flew through Manchester Airport during the school summer holidays, making it the busiest summer season in the hub’s history.

August 2025 was also the airport’s busiest ever single month, with 3.5 million passengers served by the Northern hub.

New data also shows that according to surveys of more than 3,000 passengers between January-June, 91% rated their experience of the airport as good, very good or excellent.

Some of that success was driven by good performance in security,  with 95% of passengers waiting for 10 minutes or less to get to security in August and almost 80% waiting for less than five minutes.

Manchester Airport Managing Director Chris Woodroofe said:

“Here at Manchester Airport, we are proud to connect the North to the world – and over the summer it really feels like we’ve done that.

“We’ve seen almost 7m passengers travel through the airport in July and August and we’ve worked hard to deliver a great experience for them. In the first half of the year we know that more than 90% of our passengers rated their time in the airport as good, very good or excellent.

“And having seen the work the teams here have put in over the summer – and the many, many happy faces I see around the airport every day – I feel very confident we’ll see similar figures for this period.

“Now we’re moving into a very exciting time for the airport as we get into the final stages of our transformation programme. Over the next few months we’ll put the finishing touches to our brand new, £1.3bn Terminal 2 and meanwhile we’ve started work on improving and expanding Terminal 3, with the first new parts of that opening early in the new year.

“It means that as we look ahead I think we’ll see our passengers grow even happier with the service they receive here.”

The most popular destinations during August were Antalya, Palma, Dublin, Amsterdam and Dubai – a trend that looks to continue in September as travellers look to take advantage of late summer deals in what’s known as the ‘shoulder season’: periods either side of the school summer holidays when many popular destinations are still warm but prices are lower.