As I remain on a wife-mandated vacation during the back half of the week, we take a quick look at the top ten airports in Europe by departing seats during the month of March.

Of course, it’s not enough to simply look at the top airports without considering those airlines that have built fortress hubs over said airports.

It’s impossible to look at any top charts of European airports without acknowledging the fastest growing and most fortress of the fortress hubs, Turkish Airlines’ hub in IST. Over 81% of the seats departing IST are with Turkish Airlines or one of TK’s subsidiary airlines.

And if IST is not enough, SAW (Sabiha Gökçen International Airport in Istanbul) delivers a respectable ninth place ahead of Munich. This secondary airport is dominated primarily by Pegasus, an airline we, frankly, did not expect to dominate a top ten European airport.

Notably, these seat shares include all group-owned airlines and subsidiaries with 50% ownership or greater. They also include any JV partners. For instance, IAG’s LHR hub includes American and Finnair. We decided to include JV partners to reflect the total number of seats truly controlled in the market.

Even if the hub was not dominated by a single group, we still identified the group with the largest share (I’m looking at you, Lufthansa Group at FCO).

Air travel in the content has truly turned into three large hub-and-spoke players between IAG, Air France-KLM, and Lufthansa Group.

Oh, and Türkiye - no matter which way we look at it, that country is over-performing in the air travel department.

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