UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has released figures showing the continued growth of regional airports, that is those outside London (ie excluding City, Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton and Stansted). Last year, 98m passengers (42%) flew from a regional airport compared with 2005 ” an increase of 4%.
The CAA interviewed passengers at the five London airports and at Belfast City, Belfast International, Birmingham, Londonderry, Manchester and East Midlands. In all, the survey questioned more than 200,000 people at the 11 airports about their travel patterns.
Key findings showed that Dublin (pictured above) was the most popular destination for leisure passengers from the London airports, followed by Edinburgh, New York (JFK), Malaga and Amsterdam. Edinburgh was the winner regarding business passengers with Dublin, Glasgow, Amsterdam and Manchester the next up.
Across the regional airports surveyed, Palma, Alicante and Malaga took the honours in that order regarding the holiday market with Orlando winning in terms of long-haul.
Business passengers accounted for 64% of all passengers using London City, the highest proportion in the survey. This compared with 41% at Belfast City, 36% at Heathrow and 29% at Belfast International.
East Midlands attracted the largest proportion of leisure passengers at 88%, compared with 87% at Londonderry, 83% at Gatwick and 82% at Stansted.
The most popular method of transport to many of the surveyed airports was by private car, used by 77% at Belfast International, 69% at East Midlands, and the lowest, 17% at London City. The docklands airport had the highest proportion of public transport users at 42%, proof, if ever it was needed, that a cheap railway system really does work for airports.
The survey claims that 35% of passengers at Heathrow are connecting, with 55% of the airport users not resident in the UK.
A summary of the survey is now available to download free of charge from the CAA website where the key statistics for individual airports are also available.
” Image: Billy Hicks