For the last two decades, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport has held the top spot as the busiest airport in the world.
Serving as the Delta Air Lines (DAL) headquarters and as a hub for those transferring on flights between the coasts of the United States, ATL has seven concourses and saw over 104.6 million travelers pass through it in 2024. The concourses are so spread out that in order to get between them, you have to take the famed Plane Train.
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The busiest airport crown changes with the weather
But now, according to aviation analytics platform Cirium Diio's latest numbers, Dubai International Airport (DXB) will see 15.1 million departing seats in the first three months of 2025, making it the busiest airport in the world. For comparison, Atlanta will have 14.8 million departures.
Atlanta sees traffic ramp up in the spring while Dubai has higher numbers of travelers during the winter.
In 2024 DXB saw significantly less traffic than Atlanta overall with just under 83 million travelers in 2024, compared to Atlanta's 104.6 million.
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Atlanta has also seen a drop in total traveler numbers since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, while Dubai has seen steady growth — between 2022 and 2023, seat traffic increased by 2%.
Even so, numbers are expected to even out, and Hartsfield-Jackson will once again be the busiest airport in the world once the year is over and the numbers for all of 2025 are calculated. Dubai is predicted to have 13.3% more seats in the first quarter of 2025 than it will in Q2.
Dubai and Atlanta continue to go toe to toe as the world's busiest airports
Other airports to land on the list of the world's top five busiest by the total number of departing seats include Tokyo Haneda (HND) with 13.6 million and London Heathrow (LHR) with 12.7 million. The only other two American airports to land in the top 10 include Dallas-Fort Worth International (DFW) in sixth place with 12.2 million and Denver International (DEN) in 10th with 11.4 million.
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The flagship United Arab Emirates carrier United has also recently made a major push to expand its network by investing in Airbus A380 (EADSF) planes and putting them toward new flights to Bahrain and Kuwait locally as well as farther-away destinations like Mumbai, Bologna and Edinburgh that are slated to start running in the spring of 2025.
Last October, Delta also announced its plans to continue to build out its hub at Hartsfield-Jackson with a goal of 968 daily flights and 1.1 million weekly seats from the city by the summer of 2025 — 75 flights more than in the summer period in 2024. Some of the newest destinations from the capital of Georgia include Naples in southern Italy and Brussels in Belgium, as well as increased frequencies to Zurich, Barcelona, and Toronto, as well as sunny places such as Cancun and the Caribbean nation of Barbados.
"With nearly 75 additional daily departures compared to summer 2024, this growth reaffirms its place as the world's largest airline hub," the airline announced last fall.
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