Air connectivity
Airport Industry Connectivity Report 2025
What is exactly air connectivity? How can it be measured? And how well connected is Europe?
ACI EUROPE has now released the Airport Industry Connectivity Report 2025. The Report examines developments in air connectivity, revealing recovery patterns driving aviation structural changes, which in turn reflect a new reality in the market.
(Find out more about the individual connectivity scores of airports in the Annexes to the Report.)
Using the SEO NetScan connectivity model, the report provides indexes for direct, indirect and hub connectivity based on both quantitative and qualitative metrics. The airport connectivity index is made up of both direct and indirect weekly frequencies, weighted by their quality. This means that this is not simply a measure of how many city pairs there are, or how many direct services there are. For the purposes of this report, connectivity is a composite measure of the number of destinations, the frequency of services and the quality of the connections (in the case of hubbing or indirect services). Let’s begin by outlining the various types of air connectivity that airports facilitate. The following 4 definitions describe them and together they provide a qualitative and quantitative picture of how an airport links to the rest of the world.
TYPES OF CONNECTIVITY
Direct connectivity: These are the direct air services available from the airport – measured not just in terms of destinations, but also factoring in the frequency of flights to the same destination (so for example, an airport with 5 daily flights to another airport, will register a higher score than one with only 4).
Indirect connectivity: This measures the number of places people can fly to, through a connecting flight at hub airports from a particular airport. For example, flying from Cork to a hub airport such as Amsterdam Schiphol is a direct flight from A to B. But with the vast choice of onward destinations you can fly to from there – the large number of available onward connections from these airports expands the range of destinations available from the airport of origin. Indirect connections are weighted according to their quality, based on connecting time and detours involved with the indirect routing. For example, a flight from Manchester to Johannesburg via Paris-Charles de Gaulle will register a higher score than an alternative route via Doha.
Airport connectivity: As the name suggests, this is the most comprehensive metric for airport connectivity – considering both direct and indirect connectivity from the airport in question. Airport connectivity is defined as the sum of direct and indirect connectivity – thus measuring the overall level to which an airport is connected to the rest of the World, either by direct flights or indirect connections via other airports.
Hub connectivity: Hub connectivity is the key metric for any hub airport, big or small. Essentially, it measures the number of connecting flights that can be facilitated by the hub airport in question, taking into account a minimum and maximum connecting time and weighing the quality of the connections by the detour involved and connecting times.
Please note that with the 2024 release and onwards, the methodology was updated to include all airports in the ACI EUROPE region as the aggregation basis for overall values. In the past, these values included solely ACI EUROPE member airports; therefore values have been occasionally restated resulting in an increased accuracy and overall depiction of the state of European airports' connectivity.