Article from BTNews 14 JANUARY 2019
MAG airports stay on-trend
In a week of good business news for airports, Stansted was among those reporting a record-breaking year in 2018 with 28m passengers, up 8.1%. Emirates’ daily service to Dubai led airline development, while Spain, France and Germany recorded top growth.
December saw more than 2m passengers pass through the airport, 10.3% more than the same month last year and the busiest December on record at Stansted.
The record-breaking performance helped to maintain Stansted’s position as the fastest growing major airport in the UK and one of the top five fastest growing large airports in Europe.
Stansted is one of three airports operated by MAG. Manchester and East Midlands also finished the year on a high as December saw each welcome more passengers than in the equivalent month ini 2017.
Manchester’s successful 2018 with passenger numbers up 1.7% at 28.3m came despite the loss of its seventh biggest airline, Monarch, and was driven by new long routes to Addis Ababa, Mumbai and Seattle, as well as a resurgence of leisure traffic to Turkey.
East Midlands’ annual passenger total at 4.9m was slightly down (0.2%) on 2017 but the monthly figure for December also grew, by 2.6%, to serve 231,000 passengers over the month.
MAG chief strategy officer Tim Hawkins said: “The scale of growth we’ve delivered at MAG airports over the last five years reflects the hugely important contribution they have made to driving economic growth.”
(See also 80m-passenger milestone for Heathrow in this issue).
www.stanstedairport.com www.manchesterairport.co.uk www.eastmidlandsairport.co
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