![[OC] 🛄 Annual passenger numbers at Latin America's busiest airports](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/nsrbc9du2ujf1-1536x1536.png "[OC] 🛄 Annual passenger numbers at Latin America’s busiest airports")
🛫 🇨🇴 Bogotá just dethroned São Paulo and Mexico City to become Latin America's busiest airport… here's what changed ↓
In Latin America, we increasingly catch flights, not feelings. 746M passengers flew Latin America & Caribbean routes last year, an +86M boost since 2019.
More of us caught flights through Bogota's El Dorado airport than any other airport in the region—marking a shift from the Brazilian and Mexican dominance of decades past.
No single terminal felt the surge more than Bogotá-El Dorado. The Colombian hub processed 45.4 million travelers, edging past Mexico City (44.9 M) and São Paulo-Guarulhos (43.1 M) to become the region's busiest airport for the first time. Geography helps: Bogotá sits midway between the Americas, so Avianca and LATAM have built spider-web networks that pull in connections to the US and Europe.
Tourism to Colombia has also recovered remarkably, with a 58% increase since pre-pandemic (2019) numbers.
Similar explanations can also account for the top-ten positions of both Lima and Panama City, which have become key points of transfer for inter-American flight paths. Panama and Lima, in part, replaced Mexico City's grand plans to connect the region after President López Obrador infamously canceled a new airport project during his first month in office back in 2018.
story continues… 💌
Tools: Figma, Rawgraphs
Source: List of the busiest airports in Latin America – Wikipedia
Posted by latinometrics
11 Comments
Bogota is a very nice airport. Was clean, modern, and world-class like DXB or DOH. It’s jarring to be dumped off at the third-world slum that is Miami International after being at BOG.
I’ve been to Medellin twice over the past 3 years so I believe I had a hand in this
Is there a cost savings in not having to descend as much for a landing?
Avianca becoming a budget airline helped a lot
Strange that Mexico City doesn’t have a distinction of airport just like Sao Paulo; numbers for CDMX on this chart only consider MEX. Reason for reduction in passengers compared to 2019 is due to a series of decrees which reduced hourly operations on domestic flights from 61 to 43, last of those was enacted in January 2024; the vast majority of people just migrated to NLU and a small percentage went for TLC.
After NAIM cancellation, a system of multiple airports was brought to life again (known as Sistema Aéreo Metropolitano, SAM) where AIFA was the new player here. Counting all four terminals, Mexico City served 52.9 million passengers in 2024, distributed like this:
MEX – 45.3
NLU – 6.3
TLC – 1.3
But misleading. Bogotá has 2 airports with 48 million passagens total. São Paulo has 2 with 65 million passengers and if you count vira copos in Campinas it’s over 77 million passengers.Â
Pretty cool to see Bogotá jumping up so much, they are definitely super well located for it.
Between Guarulhos and Congonhas, it seems São Paulo is still the most busy airspace, which isn’t surprising.
What is surprising is that a few brazilian airports’ activity haven’t grown much (or even shrunk) – BrasÃlia apparently peaked in flights in 2015 according to the wikipedia page.
Surprised Buenos Aires isn’t on here.
Crazy that Argentina is not in the top 10
Damn, my cities airport would rank as the 9th busiest in Latin America.
I would’ve expected more busy airports
Brazil enacting a visa for Americans isn’t helping