Gatwick suffered a slump of almost 11% in passengers in December due to severe weather before Christmas.
A total of 1.89 million passengers were handled at the airport, a 10.7% decline on the same month the previous year. The performance was blamed on flight cancellations because of the bad weather.
The airport’s operations ground to a halt on a number of occasions in early December as a result of the snow. The biggest dip in business was on flights to and from Ireland, where numbers fell 23.7%.
Overall air transport movements dropped by 11.7% to 15,206. Gatwick said that when the impact of the weather is put aside, the underlying trend showed December passenger growth “in the region of 2.6%” following two consecutive months of growth.
Overall, Gatwick handled just under 31.35 million passengers in 2010 – a 3.2% fall year-on-year. Last year marked the first full year for Gatwick under the new ownership of Global Infrastructure Partners which took control from BAA in December 2009.
While there has been no open criticism of Gatwick’s measures to clear snowfall as it paid £8 million to double the size of its snow clearing capability, Virgin Atlantic has withheld fees from BAA over its handling of snow at Heathrow.
British Airways estimated the snow disruption has cost it £50m while BAA put its own costs at almost half that figure.
Gatwick expects a boost from EasyJet this year with new flights to Jordan from March 27 in addition n to summer routes to Izmir, Verona, Bologna, Seville and Aberdeen.