Load factors for london & Spanish airports

[Icare9]

Can anyone supply useful figures on load factors per airline from London Airports (Stansted, Luton & Gatwick) to Murcia, Almeria and Alicante for comparison?
I believe that some routes have been dropped for 2009 on basis of being uneconomic, however my SLF experience has been that flights have been well supported and landing fees/taxes quite low so "interested" in what criteria used to drop certain destinations and continue with others that on paper look to have higher charges. Thanks in advance for helpful responses.

[anna_list]

The key is of course yield, not load factor.

I'm afraid the ALC numbers are too difficult to unscramble from public domain data, however, here are some of the breakdowns for LEI and MJV:

Data for Jan - Nov 2008:
MJV-STN (FR) 177,220 pax 1,092 flights 86% LF
MJV-LTN (FR) 104,817 pax 668 flights 83% LF
MJV-LGW (MON/U2) 180,569 pax, 1,249 flights
LEI-STN (FR) 55,355 pax 348 flights 84% LF
LEI-STN (U2) 75,564 pax 548 flights 88% LF
LEI-LGW (U2) 63,788 pax 466 flights 88% LF
LEI-LTN (MON) 41,311 pax 299 flights

Looking back over the stats for the last few years, I would say that these markets have got a bit over-cooked: Scheduled traffic on London - Almeria has gone from virtually nothing in 2002 to 320,000 in 2005 and has been on the decline ever since.

London - Murcia was doing less than 50,000 scheduled pax per year until 2002, when it started to explode. Last year, there were over 500,000 scheduled pax on the route and this year looks as though it will be similar.

There were over 1 million scheduled pax on London - Alicante last year, compared to under 700,000 in 2002. Such rates of growth are never sustainable.

[Jippie]

Traffic statistics for all Spanish airports(except Ciudad Real) can be found on the AENA site: Estadísticas - Aeropuertos Españoles y Navegación Aérea - Aena.es (http://estadisticas.aena.es/csee/ContentServer?pagename=Estadisticas/Home)

[Seat62K]

anna list

Two observations about the London-Alicante market (which I know very well):
(i) much of the growth in scheduled traffic has been at the expense of charter flights; a better measure would be the total number of passengers carried between the two cities; and (ii) some of the growth must be due to second home owners taking more frequent trips (in principal, there would be nothing to stop people in such a position travelling to Spain, say, every weekend, so growth may have some way to go!).
I would have thought that many passengers now flying to Murcia probably used Alicante in the past but now have the option of flying to an airport closer to their destination. Until buzz opened up the airport in 2001 there were probably no more that three scheduled flights departing per day, all domestic.
What is more likely to curb growth in the near future is a combination of the economic crisis plus the weakness of sterling which together make purchasing/running a home in Spain unachievable.

[HZ123]

I agree with 62K I cannot see these figures being repeated in 2009/2010/2011. In the UK fiscal things are set to get much worse I fear. Even when the economy picks up people will not be able to or have the spending powers they have enjoyed in the last 10+ years. It has always seemed logic to me that we in the UK cannot keep flying around at our leisure, there are still a few airline casualties to come?

[bizdev]

For info:

I bought a Villa in Spain last year and have visited it every month since then until October - mostly long weekends - but since EZY has changed its winter flying times on Friday and Monday evening (STN-ALC-STN) a long weekend is no longer possible (unless I take more than one day holiday from work) :* Every flight I have taken has been full or close to it which makes me wonder why they changed the flight times!

Bizdev

[Seat62K]

Have you looked at Ryanair?

I used to catch the Friday evening easyJet flight from Stansted to Alicante but got fed up with the frequent delays. (It might sound trivial, but I was annoyed at not being able to get to the supermarket before it closed and therefore not having any fresh milk for my "cuppa" on Saturday morning or any breakfast provisions!)