Brussels Airport reports traffic highlights for the 12 months ended 31-Dec-2009
Although traffic has shown signs of recovery in recent months, Brussels Airport closed off the year 2009 with 17 million passengers and 450,000 tonnes of cargo carried.
Passengers
The economic crisis has caused passenger numbers to drop by 8.2% on pcp, following two years of strong growth (7% in 2007; 3.6% in 2008) (17.8 million passengers in 2007; 18.5 million in 2008).
Nearly all segments including intra-European business traffic, leisure traffic and even low cost (bankruptcy of Sterling, Sky Europe and MyAir) lost between 8 and 10%. On average over the year long-haul traffic declined by 0.8% but showed a positive growth of 3.7% in the second half of the year.
In December the airport welcomed 1,136,000 passengers; 1.1% down on pcp. The persistent snowfall in the last two weeks of December thoroughly disturbed air traffic. Nevertheless December showed the best year-on-year growth rate in 2009. Without the negative impact of the winter weather December would have been the first month with a positive growth, estimated at 0.8%.
Cargo
In 2009 Brucargo handled a total of 450,000 tonnes of cargo: a decrease by 32.1% on 2008. Integrator cargo volumes suffered badly from DHL's move to Leipzig, whereas all-cargo traffic declined following the demise of Cargo B and the decline of imports and exports as a result of the crisis. Even cargo carried on passenger aircraft showed negative growth in spite of the fact that it recovered well in the second half of the year.
With 38,500 tonnes handled in December overall growth upped to -10.6% compared to 2008, driven mainly by the cargo volumes carried on passenger aircraft which grew by a spectacular 46%.
Movements
2009 registered a total of 231,668 movements: 10.5% down on 2008. As the decline is registered mainly in the segments of the small regional carriers and cargo flights, the overall seat capacity is less impacted.
New initiatives
For 2010, Brussels Airport is looking forward to the effect of Brussels Airlines' entry into the Star Alliance. New airlines too have announced flights as from this summer. Air Canada is to start a daily service to Montreal, Icelandair opens a route to Reykjavik, United Airlines will operate a daily direct service to Chicago and the Chinese carrier Hainan Airlines plans a daily service to Beijing.