London Heathrow is now officially the most connected airport in the world

Jet-setting Londoners, we’ve got excellent news. London’s Heathrow airport has been named the world’s ‘most connected’ airport for the second year in a row. In other words, pretty much wherever you want to get to, you can get there from LHR.

The ranking comes from OAG (originally the long-form ‘Official Aviation Guide of the Airways’), which is a British global travel data provider. Heathrow beat the likes of Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo Haneda and Amsterdam Schiphol to first place.

If you’re an avid Time Out reader and feeling a bit confused right now, there’s good reason for that. Just last month, we covered a report revealing that London Heathrow is no longer one of the world’s most connected airports.

So, how can Heathrow be both the world’s most connected airport and, well, not? It’s because the rankings are compiled by two different – albeit both very respectable – flight data organisations. The newest ranking was created by OAG, while the previous one comes from Cirium.

According to OAG’s new list, LHR boasts a whopping 227 international destinations and 61,356 scheduled connections. OAG’s ranking comes from combining those two numbers, though the wider study also looks at things like the ‘dominant carrier’ (in Heathrow’s case, British Airways) and the percentage of flights by that carrier (50 percent). 

By contrast, Cirium’s list is all about ‘unique nonstop destinations’. It reckons LHR has 221 of these, putting it way behind first-placed Istanbul with 309.

Interested in diving into the data behind each study? Find more about OAG’s report here and Cirium’s report here.

Time Out and London Heathrow

LHR is London’s biggest airport by a sizeable margin – so, naturally the hub’s goings-on are of interest to loads of Londoners. Did you see that Heathrow was recently named one of the world’s best airports at the 2024 World Airport Awards? Plus: see where it placed in Which?’s latest ranking of UK airports.

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