Although there was a surge in demand for flights to and from cities like Amsterdam and Milan, London’s City Airport reported a flat figure of the passenger numbers in 2017.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary last year, the airport reported that 4.51 million passengers had arrived to, or departed from, its gates in 2017. In 2016, just over 4.52 million passengers travelled through the East London hub. The overall figure, thus, has been seen to remain unaltered despite City Airport’s service to Amsterdam enjoying a 16 per cent year-on-year increase in passengers and making it unofficially the most popular route of the flights.
The airport’s Milan Linate services also performed well with a 37 per cent increase in passengers last year, driven by the launch of services by British Airways in April.
Lufthansa and British Airways, which operate their flights on the Frankfurt route, have seen about 3% increase. On the other hand, the airport recorded a 4 per cent increase in travel to and from Zurich, a route also operated by British Airways and SWISS Airlines.
Since 2010, City airport has seen a steady rise in the passenger numbers and chief executive Robert Sinclair hopes this would continue in 2018 as well who is confident about the long-term prospects for growth at London City Airport.
A four-year £480m development programme was kicked off last year with the aim to add more capacity. Also in 2017, three new airlines commenced operations from City – KLM, TAP Portugal and VLM Airlines – and five new destinations were added to the route map: Lisbon, Manchester, Prague, Reykjavik and Skiathos.
Last year, after Amsterdam, Edinburgh was the second most popular route, closely followed by Dublin.
