This article is from page 4 of the 2012-01-10 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 4 JPG
IN THE week that Aer Lingus transatlantic services out of Shannon Airport were suspended until the end of March, a new target of having 500,000 passengers a year on the North American route has been set by marketing gurus at Clare’s international airport.
Moves to target an increase in transatlantic traffic – once the jewel in Shannon’s crown – will be made over the next four years as passen- gers numbers on the lucrative North American route have been halved in the last decade.
The latest available figures for Shannon contained in the 2010 Dublin Airport Authority annual report showed there were 349,381 passengers out that year, which represents a decline of almost 50 per cent from the figure of 682,715 in 2000.
Shannon Airport Authority marketing director Declan Power has said the aim is to increase this figure to 500,000 by 2015. “That is what is sustainable for this region,” he said. “Anything over and above that isn’t going to be sustainable, services will come and go,” he added.
Figures secured by The Clare People show that transatlantic traffic through Shannon reached a record 20-year low in 2010 – the worst figures on the North American route since the compulsory stopover was abolished by then Minister for Transport Brian Cowen in 1993.
Figures on the transatlantic route stood at 372,000 in 1992, a figure that rose to 682,715 by the end of the decade, while the historic high for transatlantic business in Shannon came in 2006 when passenger numbers of 780,917 were recorded.
In setting out new goals for Shannon’s transatlantic operation, Mr Power has said “there is too much negative publicity about Shannon Airport in the media. It is a global village now and that’s picked up by all our customers. We need to talk up our region and our airport. If we talk negative about it, we’ll start believing the negativity ourselves and we might as well close up and go home,” he added.