Brisbane Airport targets 50 international destinations by mid-2030s

“Brisbane is increasingly attractive as a destination for people to work, to live and to visit and that will further increase the demand for air travel as well,” he said.

“With more people travelling, we want to offer people more choice than we currently can offer them. Our forecast is that we will, and it’s a bit of a target number, that in the mid-2030s, we will have 50 destinations or more.”

As Qantas prepares for its ultra-long-haul Project Sunrise flights from Sydney to London and New York, de Graaff said he also hopes for Brisbane to gain these or similar services.

“From an ultra-long-haul perspective, it would be fantastic, obviously, if in the future, there would be direct connections to the east coast of US or North America, and maybe even Europe direct,” de Graaff said.

“If you would have told me 20 years ago that we would have those direct flights to Europe from Perth, I would have said, ‘I don’t know about that,’ but it works and people enjoy it.

“I think that would work from Brisbane as well, when we’ve got the right connections to the right destinations.”

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His comments come as Brisbane Airport plans for a potential third terminal, as laid out in its 2026 master plan last year.

T3, billed as a “modular terminal” which can handle both international and domestic flights, is expected to have its initial phase complete in the early to mid-2030s, with further construction to be carried out in stages.

“We’re well-progressed in thinking what future terminal capacity could look like,” de Graaff told The Courier-Mail, adding that Terminal 3 “will be built in stages”.

“One of the most important questions we’re having currently is what those stages will look like because it doesn’t make sense to build, for example a 15 or 20 million passenger terminal in one go, because you will only use a very small part of that on day one,” he said.

Brisbane Airport’s $5 billion Future BNE transformation program includes renovations to its domestic and international terminals, continued planning for a new Terminal 3 precinct, aircraft parking and apron expansions, runway resurfacing, and a new aeromedical facility so medical repatriation and emergency services can be centralised at the airport.

Brisbane Airport’s master plan was approved earlier this year and will set the course for the next two decades of development at Queensland’s largest international gateway, with demand tipped to increase dramatically, especially in the lead-up to the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The airport saw a record 25 million passengers in 2025–26.