Passenger growth continues at Manchester Airport
LATEST figures show 1.19 million passengers travelled through Manchester Airport in February.
It follows a strong January when it said it experienced the best growth of any major airport.
February’s figure reflects a year-on-year improvement of 1.5% improvement, although the airport said underlying growth was nearly 5% after taking into account the additional leap year day last year.
The increase marks the airport’s 10th consecutive month of year-on-year growth. This has been put down to more international scheduled traffic, additional long haul capacity and new services introduced by low cost carriers, such as easyjet.
Overall load factors – which show how full the average flight was – reached 74.6% in February, up from 70.9% last year. Total passenger numbers in the year to February stands at 19.7 million.
Chief commercial officer for Manchester Airports Group (MAG) Ken O’Toole said: “During the first month of the year, we experienced the highest growth of any major airport in the UK. January’s passenger numbers showed that traffic at Manchester grew by 3.2% or 36,000 versus January 2012, and that’s a result of stronger overall load factors and increased capacity on a number of carriers including Emirates, Monarch, United Airlines and Ryanair.
“This year, we have our sights fixed on getting passenger numbers up past 20 million for Manchester and that will be significant because the last time we were at that level was back in 2008.
“This summer season, we will see the launch of new services from easyJet to Moscow, Stavanger with Norwegian and Warsaw with Ryanair, all of which will contribute in achieving that ambition.”
