Decline in Passengers for BAA’s UK Airports in July 2008

BAA’s UK airports handled a total of 14.8 million passengers in July 2008, a drop of 1.7% on the same month last year. A combination of a weakening economic climate, rising airfares and airline capacity cuts meant that each airport in the group and most major markets lost ground in July. Year to date BAA UK airports traffic shows a decline of 0.8%.

Among key markets the most affected were European flights (-1.4%) and UK Domestic (- 4.5%) The stimulus of Open Skies helped North Atlantic traffic to an increase of 0.6% but other long haul routes saw a collective decline of 1.7%.

Heathrow was virtually unchanged on last year, thanks to Open Skies, showing an increase of approximately 6.5% in long haul routes, but Gatwick’s losses from the same source due to the shift of long haul traffic to Heathrow contributed to an overall decrease of 1.8% despite an 11.9% increase in European scheduled traffic.

Stansted was down by 5.3%. Each of the Scottish airports also recorded slight reductions on last July.

In total the numbers of air transport movements was 0.5% lower than a year ago but cargo tonnage was up by 2.6% overall, with Heathrow recording an increase of 10.8%.

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