how many people fly BA annually?
 

Any idea where to find a good source for the number of people who fly BA (or other airlines) per year?

It's easy to find stats on the number of passenger flights per year (69 million for IAG in 2012 per their web site), but I believe that counts a person who takes 10 flights 10 times, and I'm looking for the number of discrete people who take 1 OR MORE flights on the airline within the year.

thanks for any pointers,
Bob

I would think IAG keep this kind of information secret, however your best bet is the shareholders annual report.

Don't think they would publish 'discrete' passenger numbers, It would be difficult to quantify also with no unique identifier for a passenger, what with various FF programs, passports, those not registered with BAEC or any FF program, etc.

The figures for the 5 years up to 2010 can be viewed here.

http://i42.tinypic.com/vpxc35.jpg

The above figures are for BA only (not for IAG) and can be viewed in the 2012 BA annual report which you can find here. (IAG collectively carried over 54 million passengers in 2012).

Thanks for the suggestions (and table, Irishguy!) but those IAG figures are (I believe) the number of seats occupied on flights total during the year, not the number of separate human beings who occupied those seats. In other words, if the average flier took 3.7 flights in 2012, then BA carried 10,000,000 different human beings at least once in 2012.

It's that latter number I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to find, the number of discrete humans who fly BA in a given year. Maybe that is the "passengers carried" number, but I don't think so.

No airline or transport company knows how many "discrete" (surely individual would have been a better word?) people travel with them.

That said, most BA passengers are the model of discretion. ;)

I suspect even BA do not know this. Unless every single person who flew with BA was a member of the Exec club they would not have any accurate method of measuring it.

For non EC members, all they have is name and DOB for each traveller. They could try and track this but they couldn't pick up people changing their name (e.g. women getting married or divorced) or differentiate between people with the same name and DOB.

They could track by credit card but that only tells them about the person who paid and anyway people might use multiple cards or change their card completely.

Ultimately that is why companies have loyalty schemes. So they can more accurately track individuals buying habits and try and sell them more of what they like!

Thanks all for the replies. I knew an exact count was basically impossible, but was hoping I could get some numbers. But if they aren't out there they aren't out there. C'est la vie.

thanks,
Bob

I know it's been a while - but going along similar thread, is there a way to find out
1) the number of BA passengers booking for first, business, economy class?
2) for flights into Heathrow only
Any suggestions as to where I can find such data? I've tried CAA, Heathrow and IAG websites - but not had much luck.

Thanks! :)

I'm not sure if statistics as in depth as that will be available to the general public. Can I ask what you want them for?

Little research project I'm working on - to see how the economy correlates with business flyers into Heathrow. Are you saying I would have to pay CAA for such granular data?