Travel chaos is to be expected in a British
winter and particularly so at airports.
Heathrow however managed a modest growth of
0.3% in passengers during January and estimate that would have been bettered to
1.7% had it not been for the disruption caused by snow. Still a total of 5.2
million travelers is good and on line to meet its target of 71 million for the
year. Gatwick despite wheeling out their new snowploughs suffered a passenger
drop of 0.8% in January but will easily reach a yearly total of 35 million.
Stansted copes with half of Gatwick’s passenger, so together with the two other
airports that serves London, Luton and London city, these airports serve about
132 million passengers a year.
The view is that there is a pressing need
for more capacity.
Mayor Boris Johnson favours the building of
a new modern airport on the Thames estuary at a cost of billions. The
alternatives are to build a third runway at Heathrow, expand the facilities at
Stansted and Luton and progress the expansion of Southend
airport.
But there are alternatives to building what
might become huge and costly white elephants.
The trend towards the use of larger
aircraft will increase. Better airline promotion has filled more seats, but a
70% sold seat capacity suggests that they can do much better. See how well
Emirates promote their services.
Our Government appears to under rate the
importance of tourism to our economy except as a taxation cow. The industry has
created nearly two million jobs and contributes 4% of GDP. Britain is still
very popular as a tourism destination.
We can all do much better.
Contact me at: daz@bbvs.co.uk
(Your name will not be passed on to anyone)
Contact me at: daz@bbvs.co.uk
(Your name will not be passed on to anyone)