Int'l passenger traffic at Kenya's main airport surges 2.4 pct in H1

The number of international travelers using Kenya's main airport, Jomo Kenyatta, rose 2.4 percent in the first half of the year as the facility was named the second fastest-growing in Africa, the statistics bureau said on Monday.

The airport received 2.36 million passengers in the first half of the year, up from 2.31 million passengers in a similar period in 2018, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) said.

Most of the passengers during the review period, 1.5 million, landed at the airport, while the rest embarked.

In the first half of 2018, 1.45 million passengers landed at the airport while 856,273 boarded their flights at the facility.

Most of the landing passenger traffic was from East and Central African countries of Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda and DR Congo, among others.

On the other hand, most of the passengers embarking were headed to the Middle East region, in particular Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Jeddah in Saudia Arabia.

Europe and North America, where most Kenyans in Diaspora live and are major sources of tourists whose numbers were on the surge during the period, are the other huge contributors of passenger traffic at the airport.

Cargo traffic at the airport is also on the rise, leading to the naming of the facility in September by the Airports Council International in its World Airport Traffic report as the second fastest-growing facility in Africa.

The report examines passenger numbers, cargo and aircraft movement.