Successful summer season at Manchester Airport

Over 2.3 million passengers travelled through Manchester Airport in August 2013, which was over 7% up on August 2012, with market growth at just over 5%.

The increase in passenger figures marks the airport’s fifteenth consecutive month of year on year growth, with performance attributed to an increase in international scheduled traffic at 14% higher than August 2012.

New routes during 2013 that have been part of the successful summer have included easyJet’s new service to Moscow and Norwegian’s new service to Stavanger.  The top five foreign destinations for this summer were Palma, Amsterdam, Dubai, Alicante and Dalaman.

The moving annual total for passenger numbers at Manchester Airport is now 20,381,362 million passengers.

Ken O’Toole, Chief Commercial Officer for MAG, owners of Manchester Airport, said: “We’ve had our best summer in over five years and we are delighted to see passenger numbers continuing to rise at Manchester. We have put our focus on attracting a multitude of new routes as well as increasing services on the ever popular destinations.

“We have reaped the rewards from our successful ‘Fly Manchester’ campaign since its launch in February and we are now into our fourth phase which has seen us move into Staffordshire and West Midlands to remind our larger catchment area of our ever growing services.”

Manchester’s winter programme is also looking strong with many airlines announcing new winter sun destinations. These include Thomas Cook Airlines adding three new long haul services to St Lucia, Antigua and Barbados from November, making Manchester the only airport outside of London to fly to St Lucia this winter.  Emirates are also temporarily increasing capacity and for ten days will run another Airbus A380 on two of its three daily services to Dubai from Manchester Airport.

Manchester Airport is part of MAG, the UK’s second largest airport operator, serving 42 million passengers every year through its ownership and operation of Manchester, London Stansted, East Midlands and Bournemouth airports.