Paris airports operator says French strikes cost it 470,000 passengers in Q1

(Reuters) - Paris airports operator Aeroports de Paris estimates it lost around 470,000 passengers in the January to March period due to the strikes against French President Emmanuel Macron's pension reform, the company said on Monday.

In March alone, passenger losses were around 390,000, it estimated.

President Macron on Saturday signed into law a deeply unpopular bill to raise the state pension age, infuriating unions that called for months of mass protests, which started in January this year, to continue.

Nevertheless, ADP said passenger traffic at its Parisian airports rose 44.6% year-on-year in the first quarter to 21 million passengers, standing at 88.7% of pre-pandemic 2019 levels.

Excluding the impact of the strikes, traffic would have been up 47.8%, it estimated, at 90.7% of pre-pandemic levels.

For the whole network, which includes airports in Turkey and India among others, traffic rose 45.1% over the quarter to 69.4 million passengers, or 95.2% of 2019 levels.

In March alone, Parisian airports welcomed 7.4 million passengers.

(Reporting by Piotr Lipinski in Gdansk; Editing by Jan Harvey)