Heathrow hit as Chinese go to rival hubs
HEATHROW is lagging behind major rivals in the race to attract passengers from China due to a lack of capacity, BAA warned yesterday.
London’s biggest airport is losing out to the likes of Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt, airport chief Colin Matthews said. Heathrow’s January traffic from China, including Hong Kong, was down by 0.7 per cent compared with the previous year.
Matthews said that the trend showed that capacity constraints at Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, were “damaging the UK economy when the country can least afford it.”
For 2011 as a whole, Heathrow’s China traffic was up three per cent compared with 2010 – but that compared with nine per cent in Frankfurt and Paris and six per cent in Amsterdam. Meanwhile the proposed London hub airport in the Thames estuary, backed by Mayor Boris Johnson, is not off the starting blocks.
Overall BAA, which is mostly owned by Spanish group Ferrovial, said it handled 7.5m passengers in January, up 0.5 per cent. Heathrow served 5.2m passengers last month, a record for January and up 2.3 per cent on a year ago.
Heathrow’s bleak China figures are reflected in a report from Visit Britain last year which showed that Chinese spent $54.9bn (£3.4bn) on tourism in 2010, a fourfold increase in a decade. But the UK’s share of the pie was a meagre 0.4 per cent. Airline seat capacity from the country’s airports to the UK remained stable at 40,000 per annum, while rivals’ has risen.