It’s been 15 years since Athens International Airport “Eleftherios Venizelos” opened its doors. During this time it has handled an estimated 219 million passengers and 2.7 million flights. The airport has served as a transit hub for 1.5 million tonnes of goods while its shops have been visited by 165 million passengers.

It was March 28, 2001, when at 14:59 the first arrival of Olympic Airways flight 424 from Montreal became the first flight to land at the new airport. The next day, at 06:00 am, the airport began operating normally.

A daily traffic record was set on May 23, 2007, the day off the Champions League final in Athens, when 85,000 passengers were handled in a single day.

The airport handled a record 18.1 million passengers in 2015, while airport authorities say that passenger traffic for the first two months of the year has increased 11 percent compared to 2015.

March 2016 proved to be a record-breaking month for the airport, with an unprecedented 1.3 million passengers passing through the airport for the month alone, a 17.1 percent increase for the same month last year. Internal and international passenger traffic increased 26 and 11.9 percent for the month respectively.