Passenger numbers are up 1% on the same month last year, but down from growth of 5.8% in September 2018.
A total of 1,380,033 passengers passed through Edinburgh Airport in last month, making it the busiest September on record.
Passenger numbers are up 1% on the same month last year, but down from growth of 5.8% in September 2018.
Gordon Dewar, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Airport said: “Our growth is coming from international flights, but we can see it is slowing due to policies that restrict our opportunity to grow. We unfortunately predicted this and it should be a concern to see us losing out to our competitors across Europe."
“We’re all in agreement that a sustainable future is key to aviation and actively promoting Scotland’s airports and ensuring direction connections to the world will deliver that through reduced airmiles and emission – government should be prioritising that rather than expansion at other airports in the UK which will directly impact on Scotland’s success.”
Domestic market was -4.7% behind September 2018 due to the following reasons:
- Ryanair cut Stansted frequencies from 4 per day to 4 per week
- British Airways pilot strikes resulted in 3 days of flight cancellations
Strong performance on other domestic routes:
- Flybe added more frequencies to London Heathrow (from 4 daily to 6 daily)
- Loganair started new routes to Guernsey (May 19) and Islay (Mar 19)
- easyJet’s Stansted route had more passengers than last September
- Ryanair started a new route to Derry (Nov 18)
International market recorded a +3.9% YoY growth. These are the reasons for the traffic growth in more detail:
- Ryanair introduced 8 new international routes last winter: Seville, Tallinn, Berlin Schoenefeld, Stockholm Skavsta, Lisbon, Memmingen, Sofia & Rigastarted 2 new routes this year: Billund & Luxembourg
- Emirates launched a daily service to Dubai in October 2018
- Qatar increased frequencies from daily to 10x weekly (double daily on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays)
- Delta increased from 5x weekly to daily service to JFK & launched a new route to Boston this May
- Jet2 started 3 new routes this year (Corfu, Bodrum & Bourgas)
- Lufthansa started a new route to Munich in December 2018
- Loganair started new routes to Bergen & Stavanger in May 2019
- Great Dane started operating flights to Aalborg in June 2019
Popular destinations in September were:
- Canary Islands
- Spain & Portugal: Madeira, Menorca, Malaga, Faro, Valencia & Sevilla
- Eastern Europe: Gdansk, Wroclaw, Katowice, Warsaw, Bratislava, Kaunas, Krakow & Poznan
- South East Europe: Pula, Cyprus, Heraklion, Sofia, Antalya, Malta & Dalaman
New Routes announced for 2020:
- Birmingham with easyJet (Mar)
- Bydgoszcz with Ryanair (Apr)
- Rotterdam with Transavia (Apr)
- Izmir with Jet2 (May)
Vicky is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the Editor-in Chief. She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales.
She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.
