Surely the fact that the airport is almost at bursting airport and SilverJet, Ryan and Wizz are willing to put more business through the airport but for a lack of gates is a sign that there is a point to expand the infrastructure at Luton?
Quite corect! But not unless the income generated meets ACDL's return-on-investment requirement: and it doesn't.
Why do you assume that the Airport will close down if it isn't allowed to expand? Can't it just continue at its present level of activity, which represents a five-fold increase in passenger numbers in the last dozen years?
No business can survive by standing still. The name of the game is development, adopting new initiatives, creating new markets, responding to new opportunities. You only have to look at Lydd and Southend for example, to see what years of inactivity has done. The idea that Luton can carry on regardless with no further development is just the sort of pie-in-the-sky thinking that infects the local Town Hall.
Can’t we get away from all this “political stuff” about the airport. Surely the main crux of running a company is to make a profit. There is no point in putting thousands of passengers through a terminal and getting no return because you have given an airline or airlines very generous discounts.
The charges levied by LTN are as competitive as those levied by STN. The problem is that it's a competitive market and to attract airlines into Luton necessitated competitive pricing. The Concession Fee payable to LBC makes the sums difficult to add up ~ it was always a wildy unrealistic deal anyway (and an arrangement never repeated elsewhere in the UK). Why else did the Consortium headed by Frankfurt Airport and the Consortium that included Copenhagen Airport both walk away back in 1999?