Sharm El Sheikh International Airport

Sharm El Sheikh International is the principal gateway to the South Sinai Riviera and one of the largest purely leisure-driven airports in the world, serving a resort town of roughly 70,000 residents with routinely more than 8M passengers a year. Located 18 km (11 mi) north of Sharm El Sheikh itself at 191 ft (58 m) elevation on the desert plateau above the Gulf of Aqaba, SSH owes its scale entirely to charter and scheduled tourism from Europe, Russia, and the Gulf to the diving, snorkeling, and beach resorts of Ras Mohammed, Naama Bay, and Nabq. The 49-airline lineup is dominated by European leisure carriers — TUI fly, Condor, Neos, SmartWings, Corendon, SunExpress, Nouvelair — alongside flag and low-cost scheduled service from EgyptAir, FlyEgypt, Air Cairo, Ryanair, Wizz Air, Pegasus, Turkish Airlines, and Aeroflot. The route network covers 178 scheduled services to 96 destinations, heavily weighted toward Europe (UK, Germany, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands) and Eastern European and CIS markets. International politics regularly reshape the carrier mix: UK and German flights have been suspended and restored multiple times in response to security reviews, and Russian leisure traffic — historically the single largest market — has moved through cycles of suspension and resumption. SSH operates two parallel 10,108 ft (3,081 m) asphalt runways (04L/22R and 04R/22L), an unusual configuration for a leisure airport, which gives it genuine high-capacity parallel operations suitable for simultaneous widebody arrivals during peak charter waves. Terminal 1 handles scheduled traffic and Terminal 2 handles charters; the airport has hosted major diplomatic events including the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), for which significant airside and landside upgrades were delivered.