It’s official: London Heathrow is no longer one of the world’s most connected airports

Heathrow might be the UK’s biggest flight hub, but it’s just fallen from the ranks of the best connected airports in the world. 

Despite being the globe’s fourth busiest airport, Heathrow has dropped to 12th in the world when it comes to its number of different connections.

A new survey by aviation analyst Cirium found that over the past year Heathrow had connections to 221 locations in the world. This contrasts with Istanbul, the world’s most connected airport, which has flights to 309 different locations – down to the fact that Turkish Airlines is the most extensive air network in the world. 

London Gatwick, which has about half the passengers of Heathrow, was only two spots behind its west London rival, coming in 14th place on the worldwide list and serving 218 destinations. 

In second and third place was Frankfurt (296 destinations) and Paris Charles de Gaulle (282), respectively. Amsterdam and Chicago O’Hare came in joint fourth, with 270 destinations. You can read about all the airports in the study here.

Even though LHR was busier than all of these hubs, with more than 79 million passengers passing through it last year, it couldn’t keep up with their variety of destinations. But on a more positive note, the west London airport is doing much better than it was before the pandemic, when it ranked 18th worldwide. 

London Heathrow on Time Out

LHR is the capital’s (and the UK’s) biggest airport – and news about the transport hub impacts all Londoners. Recently on Time Out we’ve covered Heathrow being named one of the world’s best airports, it becoming fourth-busiest in the world and how the west London airport could be getting much, much bigger planes.

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