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Spain's best and worst airports for delays revealed in 2025 rankings
Millions of passengers were hit by delays and cancellations across Spain last year
As another year gets underway, attention is once again turning to how well Europe’s airports are actually performing and Spain, as one of the continent’s biggest travel hotspots, is firmly in the spotlight as usual.
New figures from AirHelp, a company that specialises in passenger rights and flight disruption data, paint a mixed picture for Spanish air travel in 2025. The good news is that punctuality did improve slightly compared to the previous year. The bad news is that millions of passengers were still affected by delays and cancellations.
Across Europe, more than 935 million people flew last year, a small drop compared to 2024. Even so, more than a quarter of passengers still experienced some kind of disruption. Almost 11 million travellers were eligible to claim compensation under EU rules designed to protect passengers when flights are seriously delayed or cancelled.
Spain remains one of Europe’s busiest countries for air travel, with close to 140 million passengers passing through its airports in 2025. More than 950,000 flights took off, and just over three quarters of them departed on time.
That still left more than 34 million people dealing with delays or cancellations.
There was some improvement compared to previous years, with punctuality up by just over 1%. The number of passengers entitled to compensation has also gradually fallen since the post pandemic peak, suggesting things are slowly heading in the right direction.
When it comes to airports that performed best, Asturias stands out. Nearly nine in ten flights left on time, making it one of the most reliable airports in the country. Among the larger hubs, Bilbao once again impressed, with relatively few incidents despite handling more than 3 million passengers.
At the other end of the scale, Palma de Mallorca struggled the most. Around a third of flights there were affected by delays or cancellations, impacting millions of travellers. Reus in Barcelona (30.8%) and Corvera in Murcia (28.5%) also recorded high disruption rates, leaving many passengers frustrated.
Conversely, the Region of Murcia International actually surprised shareholders and passengers alike by closing 2025 with just under one million passengers and rounding off a year of steady growth and rising international demand.
Spain’s two biggest hubs, Madrid Barajas and Barcelona El Prat, sat somewhere in the middle, with punctuality hovering just below 80%.
Looking beyond Spain, northern European countries such as Norway, Sweden and Estonia recorded the smoothest operations overall. Southern Europe fared less well, with Greece, France and Portugal all seeing significantly higher levels of disruption.
As usual, the summer months proved to be the most problematic, with July, August and September seeing the highest number of incidents. In Spain, the single worst day for disruption was July 3, when a strike by French air traffic controllers caused chaos across the country and led to the cancellation of dozens of flights.
And if anyone was hoping 2026 might bring a calmer start, recent events suggest otherwise. British passengers travelling to and from Alicante were hit by major disruptions this week after dense fog brought flights to a halt. With visibility too poor for safe landings, planes were diverted to other Spanish airports, leaving travellers stranded and scrambling for updates on January 13.
Image: Archive
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