Passagiere am Flughafen Phuket (HKT) nach Monat, 2018–2025

What Airports of Thailand counts

The figures on this page are the monthly tables that Airports of Thailand (AOT), the listed company that operates Phuket International Airport, prints in its annual Airport Traffic Report for HKT. A passenger in these tables is anyone who disembarked from an aircraft at Phuket, anyone who embarked, and anyone in direct transit — a traveller who stayed on board the same aircraft during a stop. The three are added together, so the monthly total is a count of passenger movements through the terminal, not of people. International passengers (10.837.291 in 2025) are those on flights to or from an airport outside Thailand; domestic passengers (6.636.760) are on flights within the country, above all the Bangkok shuttles that carry both Thai travellers and foreign visitors connecting through Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang. Transfer passengers who change aircraft at Phuket are already inside the disembarked and embarked columns and are not counted again.

Aircraft movements are arrivals plus departures of every kind — scheduled airline flights, charters, technical landings, business and general aviation. One return flight is two movements. In 2025 HKT recorded 106.585 movements, or about 292 a day, and carried 164 passengers per movement, against 157 in 2019: fewer, fuller and larger aircraft than before the pandemic. Every number is taken from the AOT tables as printed; where the report shows a dash the file stores a zero, and a month that does not appear in any report is simply absent. The parser checks that disembarked, embarked and transit add up to the printed total, that twelve months add up to the printed year, that international plus domestic equals the total, and that the years which appear in two consecutive reports agree. On the 2026-09-05 build all of those checks passed.

Why airport passengers are not tourists

Headlines often present the AOT figure as “tourists”, and it is roughly two to three times too large for that. One visitor who flies in and flies out is two passengers; if the visitor connects through Bangkok in both directions, that is two international or domestic passengers at Phuket and two more at the Bangkok airport, and the transit column adds passengers who never leave the aircraft. Phuket residents flying to Bangkok, Chiang Mai or Singapore are in the same tables; so are crew positioning flights and the many travellers who arrive by road from Krabi, Phang Nga or Surat Thani and never enter the airport at all — those are in the tourism statistics but not here. For 2025 the Ministry of Tourism and Sports counts 14.248.853 visitors to Phuket province while AOT counts 17.474.051 passengers at HKT, a ratio of 1.23 passengers per visitor. The two series answer different questions and this site keeps them on separate pages: use the tourism statistics for the size of the market and its source countries, and the airport series for the pressure on the terminal, the runway and everything that starts at the arrivals door — taxi queues, transfer prices, hotel check-in times.

Recovery after COVID-19: international above 2019, domestic below

2018 and 2019 were the two busiest pre-pandemic years, 18.221.689 and 18.118.440 passengers, with the all-time monthly record before 2025 set in Februar 2018 at 1.858.152. Then the series collapses: 5.429.709 passengers in 2020 (30.0% of 2019), and in Mai 2020 — the airport was closed to commercial flights from April to mid-May 2020 — the tables show 654 passengers and 12 aircraft movements for the whole month, a figure that appears identically in two consecutive reports and is not a parsing error. 2021 was the floor for the year as a whole with 1.789.838 passengers (9.9% of 2019); international traffic that year was 287.481, the Phuket Sandbox arrivals of the second half. 2020 reached 30.0%, 2021 reached 9.9%, 2022 reached 43.1%, 2023 reached 77.2%, 2024 reached 95.0%, 2025 reached 96.4% of the 2019 total.

The recovery is uneven by segment. International passengers finished 2025 at 10.837.291, 101.6% of 2019 — above the pre-pandemic level — and +2.5% on 2024. Domestic passengers stood at 6.636.760, 89.1% of 2019 and −0.1% on 2024; the Bangkok–Phuket shuttle has not returned to its 2018–2019 size, partly because more foreign visitors now arrive on direct international flights instead of connecting through the capital, partly because domestic fares rose faster than domestic demand. Aircraft movements were 106.585, 92.2% of 2019, so the passenger recovery has run ahead of the flight recovery: the same terminal is handling almost the same number of people with fewer aircraft. The international share of passengers rose from 58.9% in 2019 to 62.0% in 2025.

Seasonality: what 2.0M passengers in Januar 2025 means

Januar 2025 was the first month in the airport’s history with two million passengers — 2.000.332, of them 1.329.613 international, on 11.351 aircraft movements, or one landing or take-off every 4 minutes around the clock. No other month has crossed that line yet. The quietest month of 2025 was September 2025 with 1.016.543, a swing of 2× between the peak and the trough of a single year; in 2019 the shape was the same, Januar 2019 at 1.828.755 against a low in September. December to February carried 31.7% of the 2025 total (29.2% in 2019); Januar alone took 11.4%. 6 months of 2025 were above 1.5 million passengers and 2 above 1.8 million.

For a traveller the January figure is a capacity statement. Two million passengers in 31 days means roughly 32.263 arriving passengers a day, and every one of them leaves the terminal by taxi, minivan, hotel car, ride-hailing or the airport bus — this is the month when the metered-taxi queue at the domestic exit is longest, when pre-booked transfers are priced at the top of their range and when the drive to Patong or Kata takes longest. The Phuket Travel Price Index records airport-transfer medians by area on the 1st and 15th of every month, so the seasonality on this page can be read against the transfer series; hotel medians follow the same calendar with the highest figures in the same weeks. The low months — September and the months around it — are when the same taxi rank is empty and the same transfer costs its low-season price. The monthly guest arrivals by nationality on the arrivals page show which markets fill the peak months and which fill the shoulders.

Coverage, gaps and updates

The file covers Januar 2018 to Dezember 2025, 96 months, taken from the AOT Airport Traffic Reports 2019–2025; each report prints the reporting year next to the previous year, so every year from 2019 to 2024 was read twice and the two readings had to match. AOT publishes only annual reports, usually between May and July of the following year, and no monthly airport-level files, so 2026 figures will appear on this page only after the 2026 report is out — expected around the middle of 2027. Preliminary figures that AOT gives in press releases and holiday forecasts are not used: they are estimates, and this site publishes only what the tables print. Cargo, the split between arriving and departing passengers and the airline-by-airline breakdown exist in the same reports and can be added to the dataset if there is a use for them.

The compiled series is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to phukettravels.com and Airports of Thailand; the CSV below carries every month with international, domestic and total passengers and aircraft movements. Source: Airports of Thailand, Airport Traffic Reports 2019–2025. Passengers = disembarked + embarked + direct transit.; retrieved September 2026. The definitions behind the tourism statistics that this page is often confused with are on the statistics hub, and every external source with its URL and licence is on the sources page.