BRS EMA NCL etc charter traffic
I know that figures can sometimes ‘prove’ anything and too many are deadly dull.
However, a study of the past twenty years or so of my local airport (BRS) shows how it has changed from a charter/inclusive tours dominated field to one where scheduled services now prevail. I remember the early 1980s, when the annual pax throughput was around 300,000 and when Dan Air operated one or two HS 748s from Belfast and Jersey and Aer Lingus flew a sparse service from Dublin, which was about it as far as scheds were concerned. The rest were the likes of Britannia and Aviaco on charters to the sun.
In 1988 100,000 scheduled passengers flew through the airport for the first time but even this was only about 15% of the overall total.
The latest BRS airport figures show a fraction under 4 million pax for the last financial year, but only 1,287,000 are charter passengers, which means that scheduled passengers now account for about two thirds of the airport’s annual total.
Obviously easyJet is responsible for much of this, with the likes of Flybe, BACX, KLM, Air France, SN Brussels, Ryanair and others chipping in. However, what is most noticeable is that although the overall figures are 11 % up on the previous year, charter traffic for the year is 0.81 % down. This past winter has been especially poor for charter traffic with numbers down most if not every month, and March being nearly 6 % down.
Is Bristol faring worse than comparable airports with its charter traffic vis-à-vis scheduled? I ask because I notice that the CAA provisional figures for March show BRS having 330,000 terminal pax, with its closest airport ‘rivals’ in size, EMA and NCL (which both have slightly more annual pax over the rolling year) having 288,000 and 308,000 respectively.
This suggests to me that both these airports have considerably more summer charter pax than BRS. Lists of based charter aircraft at EMA and NCL seem to confirm this as there are more than at BRS (all I can detect at BRS this summer are 2 First Choice A 321s, 1 Britannia B 757, 1 MyTravel A320 and 1 Islandflug B 734, and I am not certain that all these a/c are there for all of each week).
Have EMA and NCL and also the likes of LPL, LBA and CWL bigger proportions of charter traffic relative to scheduled than BRS, or is BRS reasonably typical of the picture in many regional airports?
Hey, there are a lot of figures aren’t there? Sorry! I hope that not everyone drops off to sleep before getting to the end.