Many of Europe’s smaller regional airports are struggling to recover air traffic and pay down pandemic-era debt, according to airports association ACI Europe.
The association’s deputy director general Morgan Foulkes warned last week: “It’s financial crunch time for Europe’s regional airports.”
Foulkes told the ACI Europe regional airports conference that “new market dynamics [are] exacerbating competitive pressures” and squeezing the sector with “unprecedented intensity… making it more difficult to break even, let alone finance investment in decarbonisation, digitalisation and infrastructure”.
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He said smaller airports are struggling with “below break-even revenues” from the charges paid by airlines that “have been on a steady decline in real terms over the past five years and are reaching an all-time low”.
ACI Europe reported regional airports with less than five million passengers a year are charging airlines 16% less on average than in 2019. UK airports of this size include Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds Bradford, East Midlands, Aberdeen and Belfast City.
It noted that while larger regional airports, “in particular those serving popular tourism destinations or relying on visiting friends and relatives traffic” have generally outperformed the European average for passenger traffic, smaller airports have “significantly underperformed”.
Traffic at larger regional airports, handling up to 10 million passengers a year, was up 7.5% versus 2019 in January and February, ACI Europe reported, but traffic at airports handling one million or fewer passengers remained 39% down.
Small regional airports in the UK include Bournemouth, Cardiff, Inverness, Southampton, Prestwick, Exeter, Newquay, Norwich, Teesside, City of Derry and Southend.
ACI Europe suggested the shortfall in traffic was due to “post-Covid structural shifts in the aviation market”, citing “the accelerated use of ultra low-cost carriers and relative retrenchment of network carriers” such as British Airways, Lufthansa and Air France-KLM, whose regional capacity remains 24.5% down on 2019.
It noted domestic traffic, frequently the mainstay of smaller airports, remains 6% below pre-Covid levels.