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Heathrow has lost its title as the busiest airport in the world for international passenger traffic. The oil-rich Gulf city of Dubai has knocked London off the top spot, figures from the Airports Council International show.

A total of 68.9 million passengers had passed through Dubai International annually compared with 67.8 million at Heathrow as of December 22, despite a late slowdown in traffic with one important destination, trouble-hit Russia.
It confirms Dubai’s importance as a hub airport with a huge proportion of the users just changing flights and never actually leaving the airport. It also recognises the dramatic rise of Emirates, which uses Dubai as its home base.

The rise in passenger numbers at Dubai this year came despite only a single runway being usable for 80 days because of a refurbishment scheme, which caused a temporary decline in flights.

“Given the traffic achieved in the first 11 months, together with some of the busiest days on record in December, we are confident of ending the year above the 70 million mark and confirming our position as the world’s busiest international airport,” said Paul Griffiths, the British-born chief executive of Dubai Airports. He added: “Looking forward to 2015, the prospects remain exceedingly bright, and we expect to maintain the growth achieved this year in the next 12 months.”

Figures from the airport operator for November showed that passenger traffic was up 4.3% year on year to 5.5 million.
The most important airports in terms of international movement in descending order are Dubai, London Heathrow, Hong Kong, Paris CDG, Amsterdam, Singapore and Frankfurt.