UK. BAA’s seven UK airports handled a total of 9.8 million passengers during November, down by a sharp -8.9%.
Although the underlying trend has worsened with the start of the reduced winter schedule, BAA said the November results were further affected by an industrial dispute causing cancellations of Air France services in mid-month and cancellations of long haul services late in the month as a result of the closure of Suvarnanbhumi Airport in Bangkok, Thailand.
For the year to date BAA’s UK airport traffic shows a decline of -2.4% for the 11 months to November to 134.64 million.
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All key markets were affected in November. The most significant was a drop of -17.0% in European charter traffic at what is normally the market’s quietest period. Domestic traffic was down by -12.7%, European scheduled by -9.1% and North Atlantic by -9.2%. Least affected were other long-haul services where the market was down by -3.1%.
Among individual airports Heathrow (-4.8%) was most resilient, partly because of the continuing effects of additional US services as a result of Open Skies and partly because of its greater share of the stronger long-haul markets.
Gatwick (-13.5%) felt the negative impacts of Open Skies and further airline contractions. Stansted (-13.2%) also experienced the effects of airline service cutbacks. In Scotland there were falls of -15.6% at Glasgow, -11.5% at Aberdeen and -7.8% at Edinburgh.
BAA said that it expects, on the evidence of historic economic downturns and the resulting effect on air traffic, “that the long-term prospects for growth remain good and that passenger volumes will recover in due course.”
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