Heathrow has been overtaken by Istanbul Airport as Europe’s busiest hub, with the Turkish airport handling almost 300,000 more passengers than its west London rival in July.
Heathrow published figures showing 7.86 million passengers passed through its four terminals in July — a 1.5% fall compared with the same month last year. Istanbul Airport, meanwhile, recorded 8.15 million passengers over the same period, a 2.3% increase year-on-year. According to annual data from trade body Airports Council International, Heathrow held the title of Europe’s busiest airport for almost the entire period from 1996 to 2019, lost it briefly in 2020 due to pandemic travel restrictions, regained it in 2023, and had held onto it every year since — until now.
Heathrow’s dip was driven largely by weaker demand on Middle East routes, with passenger numbers on those services down 20.2% year-on-year in July amid the ongoing Iran-US conflict. Even so, the airport still had its busiest day of 2026 so far on 19 July, when 267,000 passengers passed through as schools across the UK broke up for the summer holidays, and new airlines including ITA Airways, Alaska Airlines and Riyadh Air began operating from the airport, carrying more than 136,000 passengers between them in July alone. Heathrow handled 84.46 million passengers across the whole of 2025, its busiest year on record.
In a statement, Heathrow said it is “operating at capacity” and that “the case for expansion has never been clearer.” The airport currently runs two runways at close to full capacity, compared with Istanbul’s five, and has long been pushing for government approval to build a third runway that would lift its capacity to around 150 million passengers a year. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander launched a fresh consultation on the expansion plans in June, setting out the conditions that would need to be met for the project to go ahead. This overtaking has been on the cards for a while — Heathrow’s own chief executive, Thomas Woldbye, warned back in the spring that Istanbul was set to pass Heathrow as Europe’s busiest hub either this year or next, arguing the third runway “should have been built ten years ago.”
For drivers working Heathrow pickups and drop-offs, none of this changes the day-to-day reality: the airport remains one of the busiest and most in-demand in the world, and that isn’t likely to shift regardless of who’s sitting top of the European table.
For airport transfers in the Heathrow area, DM Airport Transfers covers the region.
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