Originally Posted by
Pizzacake
NCL is in a metropolitan area where it has more than a million people, here in NI we have two airports serving 1.7 ish, then a third not two hours drive away. Newcastle also is well seperated from its nearest international competitors by a good distance in that they would likely be Liverpool and Edinburgh. That means despite being a “smaller” airport it has a much bigger catchment area from which to draw bums to fill seats. People will be traveling further to fly to the ME or beyond via NCL than people travel to Dublin.
Originally Posted by
owenc
Belfast has more passengers than NCL by 2 million, so that's that argument out the window.
Several key points need to be made;
Yes, when looking at the raw figures, BFS/BHD is much larger than NCL (7,422,922 vs 5,650,716 in 2007; 8,396,404 vs 5,300,274 in 2017). However, in 2007 (the year Emirates commenced DXB-NCL), only 25% of BFS/BHD passengers were international passengers (1,882,354 pax), compared with 70% from NCL (3,948,594 pax). The story is the same in 2017 as well - NCL still handles twice as many international passengers as BFS/BHD, despite handling 3 million fewer passengers as a whole.
In 2007, NCL already had five hub connections - Aer Lingus (DUB), British Airways (LHR), Brussels Airlines (BRU), KLM (AMS), Lufthansa (DUS). On the other hand, BFS/BHD just had two hub connections - bmi (LHR) and Continental Airlines (EWR). Even in 2007, NCL had a much higher demand for additional hub services than BFS/BHD. In fact, BFS/BHD still only has two hub connections - British Airways (LHR), KLM (AMS).
NCL has a catchment area of 3.7 million. BFS has a catchment area of 1.95 million. However, both airports' catchment areas overlap with other airports with ME3 services;
BFS: DUB
NCL: EDI, GLA, MAN
EDI, GLA and MAN are all within a three hour drive of NCL, and for the majority of people within NCL's catchment area, these alternative airports are equidistant to NCL. Therefore, the whole 'BFS doesn't need a ME3 service because passengers can just fly from DUB instead' argument is void.
On top of that, when Emirates commenced DXB-NCL in 2007, they didn't yet operate to DUB, meaning at BFS service at the time was even less likely. In fact, DUB only received its first ME3 route in August 2007 with Etihad Airways, and it took Emirates until January 2012 to commence DXB-DUB.