What you many of you do not see or realise at an airport is the people working there. Yes the traffic figures are poor, very poor, down on last year almost back to 2004 levels. Management realise this obviously but the problem Bournemouth had was having a bigger brother airport in EMA.
To cut costs EMA took most of the jobs away from Bournemouth, things that could be shared out such as financial, human resources and marketing. Thankfully the latter has been restored because quite simply having a 'remote' marketing function was a mistake as the local knowledge was lost. They didn't know what would work or not. I think it was a couple of years ago, that they tried Bulgaria, it was a disaster.
Now that they have a 'local' commercial team headed by a Director with a manager for routes and a manager for non-aviation related (Car parks/shops etc) things (revenues not just passengers) should pick up.
They have a problem, airlines are not risking anything, they are sticking to what they know will return a guaranteed profit if these times of high fuel prices and an expensive Euro, which has a lot of uncertainty in it. Not only that but the team has only been going for a year, other airports have established team with established relationships with airlines, they are working from scratch, dealing with people from airlines who've never been to Bournemouth for years.
Another issue is that they are working not just for next summer but into next winter, do you know what the economy will be like then?
It's a hard job and I have plenty of respect for their efforts but the airlines will come.