Crete Airports 2025: 14.2 Million Passengers in Numbers (Month-by-Month HCAA Data)

In 2025, the three civil airports of Crete handled 14,213,054 passenger movements combined: arrivals, departures and transit. That figure makes Crete, taken as a single island, larger than every Greek regional airport except Athens, and roughly on par with the entire passenger throughput of Cyprus.

This article publishes the full month-by-month dataset for Heraklion (HER), Chania (CHQ) and Sitia (JSH), sourced directly from the official HCAA monthly bulletins (ypa.gr). No estimates, no projections, only what the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority officially logged.

TL;DR: Three Numbers That Matter

• 10,033,151 passengers through Heraklion International (HER) in 2025
• 4,126,799 through Chania International (CHQ)
• 53,104 through Sitia (JSH)
• Peak month: August 2025 with 2.53 million combined passengers
• Lowest month: February 2025 with 187,331
• Seasonality ratio (August / February): 13.5x at Heraklion, 12.1x at Chania

The Full Month-by-Month Table

All figures are total passengers (arrivals + departures + transit) as reported by HCAA, sheet "ΚΙΝΗΣΗ ΑΕΡΟΛΙΜΕΝΩΝ 2025", column 38 ("Σύνολο").

What These Numbers Actually Mean

Heraklion is now a full-scale international hub

10 million passengers per year puts HER in the same range as Marseille (10.6M in 2024) or Hamburg (13M). For an airport with a single passenger terminal and a runway built in the 1970s, that is a lot. The pressure is the primary reason the new Kastelli airport, currently under construction, is scheduled for commercial opening in 2028 with a designed capacity of up to 18 million passengers per year.

Chania's growth is structurally constrained

CHQ at 4.13M is performing close to its operational ceiling during peak months. July (727K) and August (730K) are within 1% of each other, suggesting the airport is essentially saturated during high season. This is consistent with widely reported pressure on slot allocations during summer 2024 and 2025.

Anyone modelling tourism growth in western Crete needs to factor this in: more flights to Chania in summer is not physically possible without infrastructure investment. The growth will spill over to Heraklion, increase route diversification (more direct flights from secondary European cities), or push demand into shoulder season.

Sitia remains a niche operation

JSH at 53,104 passengers is genuinely small, but the August figure (12,202) is interesting: it represents 23% of the entire year's traffic concentrated in one month. The airport mostly serves domestic connections (Athens) and a handful of seasonal charter flights from northern Europe. For travellers headed to eastern Crete (Ierapetra, Sitia, Palaikastro), HER remains the realistic option year-round.

The 13x Seasonality Problem

The peak-to-trough ratio for Crete air traffic is brutal. Total passenger volume in August 2025 (2.53M) was 13.5 times higher than in February (187K). For comparison:

• Mediterranean average peak-to-trough: 4-6x
• Mallorca: ~8x
• Spain national average: ~2.5x
• France national average: ~1.8x

This concentration creates well-known operational stress: staffing shortages, accommodation pricing volatility, road congestion. But it also reveals where the structural opportunity lies. Every month where the ratio narrows is a month of demand that did not exist five years ago.

Shoulder season is growing, but not where you think

Looking at the data, October 2025 at HER (1.17M) is roughly equivalent to May 2019 levels (pre-pandemic). November and March remain low (~250K combined), but October has functionally become a sixth high-season month.

This matters for any business with a fixed cost base on Crete: a property, a restaurant, a car rental fleet. Five years ago October was a winding-down month. In 2025, it logged 1.6M passenger movements across the three Crete airports, more than the entire month of June 2018.

How This Compares to 2024

Note: full 2024 monthly data is being compiled from the HCAA archive and will be added to this article in a follow-up update. Initial signals from preliminary HCAA reports suggest Heraklion was up approximately 9-15% year-over-year for most months in 2025, with the steepest growth in March, October and November (shoulder months).

If those preliminary figures hold up, it confirms a pattern that has been visible on the ground in Crete for two years: tourism is not just growing in absolute terms, it is also stretching the season at both ends. Anyone deciding when to open a guesthouse or restaurant can now make a reasonable case for an April-to-November operating window rather than the historical May-to-October.

Methodology and Sources

All passenger figures in this article are extracted from the HCAA (Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority) monthly traffic reports, published as Excel files on ypa.gr under the label "ΚΙΝΗΣΗ ΑΕΡΟΛΙΜΕΝΩΝ" (Airport Traffic).

• Sheet structure: one sheet per month (01 through 12), plus an annual consolidation sheet labelled "2025"
• Column used: column 38 (zero-indexed) = "Σύνολο" (total passengers = disembarkations + embarkations + transit)
• IATA codes: HER (Heraklion), CHQ (Chania), JSH (Sitia)
• Data quality: HCAA bulletins are typically published with a 6 to 8 week delay after the end of each month; the 2025 annual file consolidates data validated by HCAA's statistics service

We publish this data because, to our knowledge, no other Crete-focused publication has aggregated and contextualised it in a single place. If you are a journalist, researcher or tourism operator and want to cite these figures, please link back to this page. We will update it whenever HCAA releases revised numbers.

Want the raw data?

The full XLSX file is available directly from HCAA at ypa.gr. We are also working on an open dataset (CSV + JSON) covering 2024, 2025 and 2026 month-by-month across the three Crete airports. If that would be useful for your work, let us know via the contact form and we will prioritise its release.

Crete Direct is an independent publication based on the ground in eastern Crete. We focus on data and primary sources rather than promotional content.