Basel EuroAirport announces ambitious expansion project

The existing terminal at the hub on the Swiss-French border is to be joined by another, almost as large. Keystone / Georgios Kefalas

Basel-Mulhouse airport (EuroAirport) is to invest €130 million (CHF124.4 million) in extending its passenger terminal between now and the early 2030s, its management said on Friday.

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The current terminal of 15,000 square metres will be renovated and flanked by a new building of equivalent size (14,000 square metres) with the aim of “improving the quality of service”, EuroAirport said in a press release.

With the addition of external improvements to “reorganise access”, the investment for this project represents a total budget of around €130 million, the management told the AFP news agency.

The works will take place between 2027 and 2030/2031. The project design contract has been awarded to a team of architects led by the French firm drlw and the Basel company Vischer Architekten, the airport said.

Euroairport’s management told AFP that the candidates’ proposal “convinced by its elegant architecture, its integration into the existing terminal […] and the clear improvement in the quality of service it generates”.

Post-Covid boom

At the beginning of the year, EuroAirport director Matthias Suhr emphasised that “optimising passenger service is a key concern for us”.

The Franco-Swiss hub has been looking for a way to respond better to the clear upturn in traffic following the Covid-19 pandemic, while protecting itself against any possible new downturn. It believes it has found the answer with a doubling of capacity, which it calls “Modular Terminal Evolution” (MTE) to reflect the fact that it is “divided into separable modules, allowing gradual and flexible implementation”, according to the press release.

With 8.9 million passengers passing through, EuroAirport had the second-busiest year in its 75-year history in 2024 – numbers were just 200,000 fewer than the 2019 record, on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic. They were up 10% on 2023.

The airport has thus consolidated its position as the third busiest in Switzerland, after Zurich and Geneva, and the sixth busiest in France.

Its management expects to reach a new record this year with some 9.2 million passengers.

Translated from French by DeepL/dos

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