AIRPORT HUB · CAPE TOWN
Cape Town International closed 2025 with 11.1 million passengers — an all-time record, finally above pre-pandemic 2019 — with international traffic at 3.3 million (+7%), December setting a festive-season high, and cargo up 42%. South America joins the route map in July 2026.
Cape Town’s growth is not accidental — it is the output of Cape Town Air Access, the Wesgro-powered route-development initiative that has spent a decade lobbying airlines city-pair by city-pair. The 2025/26 summer brought frequency increases from United, Delta, Condor, KLM, Norse, Air France and TAAG; Emirates, Qatar and Ethiopian add more in 2026.
The signature win lands in July 2026: LATAM’s three-weekly São Paulo service — Cape Town’s first-ever direct South American link, closing the last missing continent on the route map. In December 2025 the airport handled 28.5% of all international arrivals into South Africa.
Success has a bottleneck: the domestic arrivals hall dates from the T2010 rebuild and is at capacity. ACSA’s answer is a R10.1-billion programme — new Code F runway rotated 11.5 degrees (R6.39bn, contractor to be named December 2026), a new domestic arrivals terminal (R2.39bn from April 2027), departures extension (R500m) and international upgrades (R863m).
And a challenger approaches: the privately funded Cape Winelands Airport, an R8-billion greenfield north of Durbanville, is scheduled to open in 2028 with its own navigation infrastructure — a Lanseria-style complement that ACSA publicly welcomes as network redundancy.
The TIO read: CPT is the best-run demand story in African aviation — a decade of route development compounding into records, with cargo growing even faster. Watch two dates: the runway contractor in December 2026 and LATAM’s first São Paulo arrival in July. Both change the airport’s geometry.
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