Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport ranked the most connected megahub in all of Asia

We’ve often said that one of the things we love about Jakarta is that it’s a great travel hub (we get the irony of saying we love a city because of how easy it is to escape, but nonetheless…). By virtue of its geographic location and the multitude of low-cost carriers in the region, it’s easy to do quick and cheap getaways to tons of great tourist hotspots throughout Asia from the Indonesian capital.

But while we’ve often touted Jakarta as a travel hub, we never had any hard evidence that we could point to that we were in any way better than say, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. But now, thanks to a new report by UK-based travel intelligence company OAG, we have our proof that Jakarta is indeed one of the best places for travelers in the whole world.

According to OAG’s recently released “Megahubs Index 2016”, which measures the most connected airports in the world, Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International airport (yes, we know, technically it’s in Tangerang) came in 7th in the global rankings. The first six spots were taken up by airports in the United States (with Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport coming in first), making Soekarno-Hatta not just the most connected in Asia, but the most connected outside of the US.

So how exactly does OAG measure connectivity? For the Megahubs Index, OAG calculated the total number of all possible connections between inbound and outbound flights within a six-hour window at the largest 100 airports in the world. Based on their data, OAG calculated that on its busiest day Soekarno–Hatta had over 40,000 potential connections between flights within six hours, connecting passengers between 71 destinations.

Of course, one might argue that the high volume of flights is just as much of a hindrance to travelers going through Soekarno-Hatta as it is an advantage since the airport has long been over-capacity (with an estimated 33 million passengers currently passing through the airport each year), making flights prone to delay and other service problems. But OAG still thought our airport deserved praise, especially in light of the major expansion it is undergoing with the recent opening of the expanded Terminal 3.

“There is dynamic growth continuing all across the Asia-Pacific region as more and more new air markets are opened. It is equally impressive that Soekarno-Hatta is maintaining high levels of connectivity whilst undergoing extensive development of the terminal infrastructure. Demand within and to/from Indonesia continues to be strong so there is a clear challenge for the airport to keep pace,” said OAG product management EVP Mark Clarkson in a press release.

So Soekarno-Hatta might not be the prettiest airport in the region (Changi), or have the greatest facilities (Changi), but travelers in Jakarta can now at least brag that we definitely have more travel options available to us on a given day than anywhere else in Asia.



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