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Yeah, working PRM at Heathrow, I’ve seen the numbers creeping up year on year, and it’s not just busy days feeling busier the whole trend is shifting.
Across Europe (and it lines up with what we see here), PRM passengers now make up around 1% of total air travellers, up from about 0.82% back in 2019. At bigger hubs like Heathrow, that figure is even higher large airports reported hitting 1.44% in recent surveys. That might not sound massive, but when you’re handling tens of millions of passengers a year, it adds up fast. Globally, estimates put the number of people with reduced mobility flying each year at over 60 million, and with ageing populations plus more people travelling who have hidden disabilities or temporary mobility issues, that demand is only going one way.

Post-COVID recovery has amplified it too. Overall passenger traffic bounced back strongly — UK airports hit a record 302 million passengers in 2025, beating pre-pandemic levels — and PRM requests have grown faster than general traffic in many places. At Heathrow, we’ve been publishing service performance reports showing high volumes, especially in summer peaks (May to September), when the majority of assistance calls come in. Requests also spike at certain times of day, which plays havoc with rostering.

Airports have responded by ramping up resources. In Europe, the number of staff directly involved in PRM assistance jumped by over 33% between 2019 and 2023. A lot of places (including us) now use dedicated PRM management software to handle bookings, track jobs, and reduce no-shows or double-bookings. Pre-notification (ideally 48 hours, minimum 36) still makes a huge difference for planning, but we still get plenty of ad-hoc requests on the day, which stretches the teams.

The market for PRM assistance systems and tech is growing quickly too — forecasts show the sector expanding at healthy CAGRs as airports invest in better coordination tools, ambulifts, aisle chairs, and digital booking platforms.