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Aer Lingus passenger numbers down on Belfast route

Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Half-yearly passenger numbers on the Aer Lingus Belfast/ Heathrow route are running more than 60,000 behind the airline's abandoned Shannon/ Heathrow link.

The news comes just over a year after the airline announced plans to axe the Shannon service in favour of Heathrow, provoking local outrage.

The latest figures from the UK's Civil Aviation Authority show just over 109,000 passengers used the Belfast/ Heathrow link between its launch on January 14 and June, well behind the 170,000 passengers who used Shannon/ Heathrow during the same period in 2007.

A spokesman for Aer Lingus said that 74pc of its Belfast/Heathrow seats had been taken up in July.

He declined to comment on the yield or profit per passenger and said: "When you are building up a route, the first priority is to build up traffic."

"The Belfast base is performing well and performing to expectation.

"We are where we want to be and quite satisfied," he added.

Aer Lingus has been asked to reconsider its Shannon/ Heathrow services.

The airline, however, has insisted it will not reconsider the move, a point re-emphasised by chief executive Dermot Mannion at a Dail Committee meeting last month.

He added that he regretted "the damage that was caused to our reputation in the Shannon area during three or four months of last year".

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It makes no sense to introduce a route to Heathrow from Belfast when there's one there already - I live quite close to Shannon and the loss of that route has had a huge impact on business in the area. I also agree with Allan that the decision seems to be politically influenced - in these troubled times for airlines nobody in their right mind would introduce a route where there's already a good service, I just hope for the sake of the workers in Belfast that they don't end up losing their jobs if Aer Lingus decides to pull the plug again.

Posted by Angie | 28.08.08, 10:50 GMT

Actually considering that this is the first year of operation for the route, 109,000 passengers is quite good. At Belfast Aer Lingus are up against more competition than they were at Shannon but they still manage to achieve a healthy passenger figure, only 60,000 down on a route that had 50 years of operation.

Posted by Kevin | 06.08.08, 21:33 GMT

These results come as no surprise. The decision by Aer Lingus to ditch their Shannon service to Heathrow in favour of Belfast International to Heathrow was ill conceived from the outset. Belfast already had a perfectly adequate service to Heathrow operated by BMI and, with passengers numbers to Heathrow dropping every month, there was no need for another three flights a day.

It seems to me that the Aer Lingus decision was more of a politically influenced one than a commercial one.

Posted by Allan | 06.08.08, 13:10 GMT