0871 360 2443 BAA December and Annual figures comparisons.
BAA controls the important airports of Heathrow, Stansted, Southampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen and up to recently Gatwick until the Competition Commission forced the sale of this airport in November 2009.
As such, due to the amount and scale that their figures cover, it is a very good barometer as to how the travel industry in general is performing during the longest and hardest recession seen in the UK since the war. Their figures will be a fair indicator of what to expect from airlines companies, car park operators, travel agents and airport hoteliers.
The figures whilst down give a ray of hope that the tide is turning. The best performance goes to Heathrow up 1.5% for the month and only down 1.5% for the year with Stansted reporting its best month since March 2008 altough still showing a year on year decline of –10.7% with the deficit for December reduced to –2.6%.
A total of just under £107 million passed through these airports recording an overall reduction of 4.6%. The breakdown for each airport is given below
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Heathrow down 1.5% on 2008, to 65.9 million.
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Stansted down 10.7%, to 20.0 million.
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Southampton Airport down 8.2% to 1.8 million.
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Edinburgh Airport’s traffic up 0.6% to 9.0 million.
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Glasgow down 11.3% to 7.2 million.
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Aberdeen down 9.4% to 3.0 million.
For the year the overall UK reduction for these airports was -4.2% but the deficit for December was reduced 0.9% which is encouraging given the bad weather caused flight cancellations at most airports.
The Scottish airports of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow show a less healthy picture with the annual drop of -5.8% aganst and even bigger fall for December of –6.9% WITH Glasgow and Aberdeen the worst affected airports.
The increase in cargo activity increased by 20% in tonnage handled in December which goes to demonstrate that the weak pound is helping exporters although over the year the annual tonnage handled was down a massive –7.7%.
More encouragingly, the recent rebound in cargo activity continued in December with an increase of 20% in tonnage handled the UK’s trade recovery. This still left the annual total 7.7% below the previous year at 1.5 million tonnes.
The UK was officially declared out of recession yesterday but a 0.1% growth figure did little to steady intyernational confidence and the pound once again struggled against a basket of currencies.
So what does this all mean to the suppliers of travel? Clearly the continuing weak pound does little to help, making foreign holidays even more expensive and along with the cost of airline fuel.
Tourism depends on people having the confidence to spend and whilst these figures show a little encouragement the general concensus is it will be at least until 2012 before we return to pre-recession volumes. Which means that for those fortunate still to be in well paid and secure job bargain flights, heathrow airport hotel parking, airport car parking and holidays in general will available all this year at least.
