Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, saw a record 92.3 million passengers pass through its terminals in 2024, officials announced Thursday (January 30, 2025).

The result cements Dubai’s bounce-back from the coronavirus pandemic, surpassing the previous record set in 2018 for the first time. Today, the airport feels like it’s bursting at the seams with aircraft movements and crowds moving through its cavernous terminals.

Also Read | India tops list for highest number of passengers at Dubai airport with 11.9 million arrivals

Authorities plan to move operations in 2032 to the city-State’s second airport after a nearly $35 billion upgrade.

Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, first announced the new passenger figure on X. The state-owned airport is home to the long-haul carrier Emirates, which powers the network of state-owned and state-linked businesses known as “Dubai Inc.”

“Dubai is the airport of the world … and a new world in the aviation sector,” Sheikh Mohammed wrote.

Speaking with The Associated Press, Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths pointed to the fact that the airport had served more than 700 million passengers over the last decade — closing in on twice the population of the United States.

The 2024 result “is not only a record for us, of course, but as the No. 1 airport in the world, it’s a new world record for international passengers through any airport in the world,” Mr. Griffiths said. “And the great thing is that’s with two runways on a very limited geographical footprint, which hasn’t really changed at all.”

In 2023, the airport, known as DXB, had 86.9 million passengers. Its 2019, traffic was 86.3 million passengers. It had 89.1 million passengers in 2018 — its previous busiest-ever year before the pandemic, while 66 million passengers passed through in 2022.

In 2024, India remained the top destination market for DXB, with 12 million passengers. Saudi Arabia followed with 7.6 million and the United Kingdom at 6.2 million. DXB and Al Maktoum International Airport, known as DWC, serve 106 airlines flying to 272 cities in 107 countries across the world.

A real-estate boom and the city’s highest-ever tourism numbers have made Dubai a destination as well as a layover. However, the city is now grappling with increasing traffic and costs pressuring both its Emirati citizens and the foreign residents who power its economy.

Dubai plans to move its airport operations to Al Maktoum International Airport, about 45 kilometers (28 miles) away from DXB. The airport, which opened in 2010 with one terminal, served as a parking lot for Emirates’ double-decker Airbus A380s and other aircraft during the pandemic. But since then, it has slowly returned to life with cargo, commercial and private flights. It also hosts the biennial Dubai Air Show and has a vast, empty desert in which to expand.

Griffiths said that authorities plan to move Emirates, its low-cost sister airline FlyDubai and others to DWC by 2032. Computer-rendered images show the facility as having a curving, white terminal reminiscent of the traditional Bedouin tents of the Arabian Peninsula. Plans call for it to have five parallel runways and 400 aircraft gates.

With DXB already having so-called smart gates that can do facial recognition to speed passengers through immigration, Griffiths said that building DWC offered an opportunity to rethink traditional airport designs of separate locations for ticketing, security and other checks.

It should be “a bit like a really well-designed railway station — you should arrive at the airport, face recognition through the gate and immediately you are at leisure,” he said. “You can shop, you can dine, you can go into a lounge. You’ve got more time, which hopefully will turn into more income for the airport and will pay for the processes and the reengineering.”

Dubai’s passenger numbers have been ahead of its traditional rival for international travel, London’s Heathrow Airport, for a decade now. On Wednesday, the U.K. government backed the construction of a third runway at Heathrow, a decadeslong debate for the airport.

However, Griffiths said that he remained confident Dubai would remain ahead.

“I wouldn’t mind betting that when DWC Phase 2 opens, they’ll still be talking about Heathrow runway three and no spade will have gone into the ground,” he said.

Dubai airport, one of the world’s busiest, witnessed major disruption for a third straight day Thursday after the heaviest rains on record drenched the desert United Arab Emirates.

Emirates, Dubai’s state-owned flagship airline, and sister carrier flydubai resumed check-ins after telling passengers to stay away on Wednesday when thousands of delayed passengers clogged the airport.

The airport, which handles more international passengers than any other, hopes to resume “something approaching normality” within 24 hours, Dubai Airport CEO Paul Griffiths told AFP.

Some 1,244 flights were cancelled and 41 were diverted on Tuesday and Wednesday after torrential rains flooded the Middle East financial centre including its homes, malls and offices, and highways.

Traffic congestion remained severe on Thursday, two days after the storms, with at least one major road completely blocked by water and multiple junctions cut off by flooding.

Climate experts say the rains, the UAE’s heaviest since records began 75 years ago, are consistent with changes caused by global warming.

“There’s no news here,” Karim Elgendy, Associate Director at the Buro Happold engineering consultancy and associate fellow at Britain’s Chatham House think tank, told AFP. 

“We are expecting an increase in variability of rainfall, which means more extreme events, more drought and an increase in intensity of rainfall when it does rain.

‘Deeply distressed’ 

Dubai airport has witnessed chaotic scenes with crowds of marooned travellers clamouring for information about their flights.

Even as Emirates and flydubai resumed check-ins, more than 200 departures were listed as delayed or cancelled on the airport’s website.

Griffiths said it was “challenging” to get the airport fully functional, with supplies and staff also held up on flooded roads.

“Getting supplies through, people and all of the necessary things to the airport to help the schedule recover, was a massive challenge because all of the roads were blocked,” he said in an interview.

“We just hope that the level of customer care that we’ve been able to provide will go some way to mitigate the impacts that we had to customers. But obviously we’re deeply distressed by all of the disruption and concern that we’ve created,” he added.

One elderly couple’s 14-hour flight from Brisbane took 24 hours on Tuesday after it was diverted, and they were then unable to reach their hotel because of the flooding.

“It’s just the start of our holiday and I feel like going home — and I don’t know how to do that either,” Julie, 72, told AFP through tears.

“When they landed the plane on this airfield that was deserted, there was no terminal, there were no other planes and I thought we had been hijacked by terrorists,” she added, without giving her surname.

Makeshift ferry

Although schools and public sector offices have been closed until next week, traffic returned to the roads with some motorists, finding their route blocked, driving the wrong way down highways.

Supermarkets had empty shelves as deliveries failed to arrive, and retail staff reported having to stay overnight or sleep at hotels because they could not get home.

“We’re working but the problem is we’re not receiving chicken,” said one employee at a chicken restaurant that had no chicken or fries on display.

“The delivery cannot come here because of the flood.”

In the Arjan district, a man used a canoe to paddle passengers across a flooded street.

With taxis hard to book and hail, private motorists were stopping at queues of people and offering rides for high prices.

British visitor Chris Moss, 30, was one of those looking for a cab as he tried to reach the airport and locate his lost luggage.

“When we arrived the baggage area was full of bags but my luggage was nowhere to be seen,” said Moss, whose plane, hastily booked after his original flight was cancelled, arrived five hours late.

“It was still on the plane because the baggage area was flooded and they couldn’t get the bags off.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)