BAA's passenger traffic down 0.9%

BAA’s six UK airports handled 8 million passengers in December, down 0.9% on last year.  Passengers at airports across Europe and North America were affected by cancellations and disruption arising from fog and snow.  It is estimated that weather conditions accounted for the loss of 150,000 passengers at BAA's airports. 

Heathrow, the UK’s hub airport, recorded a 1.2% increase in passengers, driven primarily by an increase in European scheduled traffic and the long-haul network to Asia, Africa and Australia.

Stansted declined 2.6% in December, the best performance since March 2008. Scottish airports were impacted by the collapse of the airline Flyglobespan, as well as by the weather.  Compared to last year, Glasgow was down 8.8%, Edinburgh down 4.4%, Aberdeen down 9.4%.

Southampton’s passenger figures declined 5.9% in December.  Naples Airport in Italy recorded strong growth of 14.5%.

All major markets suffered from the bad weather.  Domestic traffic was down 6.5% on last year but European Scheduled traffic was up 1.6%.  North Atlantic traffic was down 5.7% while other long-haul routes were up 3.5%.

December’s results took the total for BAA’s UK airports in 2009 to 106.9 million, down 4.2% on 2008.  The rate of decline slowed to 1.2% in the fourth quarter.
Annual passenger figures for the airports in 2009 are as follows:
- Heathrow down 1.5% on 2008, to 65.9 million.
- Stansted down 10.7%, to 20.0 million.
- Southampton Airport down 8.2% to 1.8 million.
- Edinburgh Airport’s traffic up 0.6% to 9.0 million.
- Glasgow down 11.3% to 7.2 million.
- Aberdeen down 9.4% to 3.0 million.

Following the sale of Gatwick Airport on December 3 2009, passenger figures from that airport will no longer be included in BAA’s figures.

Colin Matthews, BAA’s chief executive, said: “2009 was a difficult year for our airline customers.  Towards the end of the year, we saw signs of improvements, particularly at Heathrow, but there are more challenging times ahead in 2010.”
In total, the number of air transport movements at BAA’s UK airports fell by 3.9% in comparison with December 2008 with the result that the figure for the year as a whole (935,000) was 6.5% down on 2008. 

More encouragingly, the recent rebound in cargo activity continued in December with an increase of 20% in tonnage handled the UK’s trade recovery. This still left the annual total 7.7% below the previous year at 1.5 million tonnes.
 

Source: Transportweekly