Fewer travelers flew to and from Israel in 2009, according to government statistics released Sunday. The drop was small, but significant. Specifically, 5.14 percent fewer travelers passed through Ben Gurion International Airport, with 10,500,960 passengers departing from the country on a total of 81,711 flights. This included scheduled, chartered and private planes.
Of the total number of travelers, 5,241,184 entries into the country and 5,259,775 exits from the country were recorded.
While travel was significantly down in the first half of the year, things picked up during the second half. The month of August was the busiest in the airport's history, with 1,421,846 passengers flying into and out of the country – 6 percent more than the total of the previous August.
Most trips out of Israel were to the United States, with 1,405,565 passengers flying to destinations there.
Flights to Turkey were second, with 890,855 passengers – 33.3 percent fewer than in 2008, due to the many cancellations by Israelis who decided against vacationing in Turkey this year. The change in plans came in protest over Ankara's anti-Semitic propaganda, in which IDF soldiers were shown in a TV series that claimed Israelis were killing children in Gaza.