This article is from page 36 of the 2008-07-29 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 36 JPG
THE AXING of the Shannon/Hea- throw route by Aer Lingus has cost Shannon Airport 57,000 London passengers, but airport bosses are staying positive, saying that to lose some of the loaf is better than losing all of the bread.
In the last 12 months of the opera- tion, Aer Lingus carried 331,000 pas- sengers between Shannon and Hea- throw.
The numbers now travelling be- tween Shannon and all of the London airports which it services are down 57,000 for the first six months of this year, a drop of 16 per cent. There has also been a 20 per cent drop on trans- atlantic passenger figures.
“It could have been worse – we could have been down 330,000, but with Ryanair putting on extra flights, in a sense, we have hung on to a lot of the business,” an airport spokes- person said.
Ryanair are now the sole carriers for London traffic, providing four flights daily to Stanstead, two to Gat- wick and one to Luton.
The airport authority has not given up on the hope that CityJet may yet provide a service to London City.
“We are still talking to them about that. CityJet were before the Oireach- tas Committee on transport last week and they expressed their satisfaction with the Shannon-Charles de Gaulle route. They told the committee they are crunching the numbers on the Shannon-London City route,’ the
spokesman said.
While CityJet’s venture in Paris ap- pears to be a hit with the travelling business sector, they cannot replace the volume of connectivity which was offered on the Heathrow slots. Until
January 14 last, Aer Lingus were of- fering 700 seats daily. The smaller CityJet planes flying into Paris are offering 200 seats a day. The Airport Authority concedes that business has been lost to Cork Airport.
“We know for a fact that the Cork- Heathrow numbers have increased greatly, so obviously some of that is former Shannon-Heathrow traffic,” the spokesman said.
Commenting on the traffic figures
generally, Airport Director Mar- tin Moroney said that a downturn in traffic had been expected due to a number of factors, but there are a number of positive developments which give rise to optimism for the remainder of 2008.
“A downturn in transatlantic traf- fic had been expected this year due to the effects of ‘Open Skies’ which are, in fact, in place since the begin- ning of the winter 2007/8 schedule. The confirmation by Aer Lingus of year-round commitment to their Shannon transatlantic routes was a welcome development as was the an- nouncement earlier this year of ad- ditional promotional funding aimed at supporting traffic development on all transatlantic routes to Shannon,’ said Mr Moroney.
He added that short-haul traffic numbers had suffered owing to the loss of the three daily London-Hea- throw services and Centralwings’ withdrawal. However, Ryanair’s re- cent announcement of new services to and from Poland will compensate for this, he said. “The new CityJet-Air France service is performing well with high load factors, albeit with less capacity and frequency than the Heathrow service had offered. How- ever, market demand is expected to result in a larger aircraft operating this service in the autumn”.