All Names Taken, thanks for your comments and I agree with most of them.
What I am pointing out is that MAN is the only non-capital/principal city airport in Europe which has achieved this volume without receiving major state aid and without the patronage of a flag carrier. Period. When you're a capital city airport the government will step in to make sure that the facilities present a fitting gateway to the country. When you are the flag carrier's home base they will stump up the fees to pay for top class facilities and drive volumes through hub connecting. MAN has neither of those privileges and its volume is made up of a lot of small to medium sized operations, no really large ones and no flag carrier base like all the other airports in its throughput range,
Lots of full service airlines serve MAN with one, two, or three flights a day. They want to be here but their limited operations don't pay the level of fees required to fund the top class facilities they enjoy at their hub bases. The UK government doesn't subsidise and so you get what can be afforded. To take one of your examples - STN is lo-co dominated, nothing like the diversity of MAN, traffic which had little choice of where else to go in London, a capital city airport which benefitted from massive state funding of infrastructure in the 1980s/90s. That laid the basis for its throughput today.
MAN is unique, out on its own, and so unfair to compare on service levels.
Last edited by roverman; 17th Dec 2015 at 23:42.