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Alicante airport’s busy autumn long weekend points to a record-breaking winter ahead
Flights jumped 10% over the October holiday, nearly matching the airport’s August peak
Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport closed out a record summer only to roll straight into an unusually busy October, a strong sign for what the coming winter season might bring. Over the long weekend running from Friday 9 October through to Monday 12 October, the airport expected to handle 1,725 flights in total, up 10.64% on the same four day stretch last year, when 1,560 operations were recorded.That kind of growth is nothing new this year. The airport has posted double digit passenger growth every single month of the summer, with cumulative passengers passing 14.7 million by the end of August, a 9.9% rise on the same period in 2025.
What’s striking about this particular weekend is just how close it came to matching peak summer traffic. The 1,725 flights scheduled for these four days sit only just below the 1,779 flights recorded over the last weekend of August. Saturday 10 October was the busiest single day, with 469 flights, almost identical to the 488 flights operated on the last Saturday of August. Across all four days, traffic never dipped below 400 flights daily, 428 on Friday, 469 on Saturday, 415 on Sunday and 414 on Monday.
Industry estimates suggest this momentum should carry through the whole winter season, with the Costa Blanca Tourist Board forecasting growth of between 5% and 10% between late October and the end of March. Airlines have provisionally scheduled more than 4.2 million arrival seats across up to 203 routes, based on figures gathered to the end of September.
New routes are helping drive that growth. Ryanair launches flights to Catania in Sicily on 25 October, with Wizz Air adding the same route from 15 December, and from January 2027 Wizz Air will also connect Alicante with Târgu Mureș in Romania. Several summer routes are being extended into winter too, including Eurowings to Hanover, Royal Air Maroc to Casablanca, Luxair to Luxembourg, Air Serbia to Belgrade, FlyOne to Yerevan, and Ryanair’s connections to Saarbrücken and Bratislava.
It all builds on a summer that was already the airport’s best on record, with 6.8 million passengers passing through between June and August alone, an 11% rise on last year, and British travellers accounting for one in three of them, with Manchester the single busiest route.
Airlines are still finalising their full winter schedules, and tend to hold off confirming slot reservations later than they once did, adjusting around fuel prices, geopolitical shifts and weather. Even so, the early projections point to Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport setting a new annual record by the end of 2026, comfortably beating the near 20 million passengers it handled in 2025, with the winter season itself also expected to outperform the previous year.
Image: alicantetravel
