Gatwick passenger numbers boosted by bad weather
Cold weather and the early Easter helped London Gatwick grow passenger numbers by 2.5% to over 2.5 million passengers during March.
The figure was the highest seen in March for five years.
Traffic to long haul markets grew 5.1%, with 27,800 more passengers travelling to destinations across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
Following several months of decline, European scheduled traffic was up 1.9% and European charter traffic was up 3.9%.
Gatwick’s load factors reached a record for the month at 83.1%, up 3.2% on the prior year.
Despite continuing tough economic conditions, full year traffic to the end of March grew by 1.2% taking the total number of passengers handled by Gatwick in 2012-13 to 34.2 million passengers – up from 33.8 million in the prior year.
Gatwick said this was boosted by new airlines operating out of Gatwick, including Air China, Air Arabia Maroc, Iraqi Airways, Icelandair, WOW Air, Caribbean Airlines, Vueling and Gambia Bird.
The growth was also helped by increased frequencies and higher load factors from incumbent airlines such as easyJet, British Airways and Norwegian Air Shuttle.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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